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Combining Data From Two Multiple-Select Fields Into One

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Lif_Alcon
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Hello all,

I am stumped. I am trying to combine data from two multiple select fields, into one. For the sake of confidentiality, I have created an example of what I am working with, using part of the Greek alphabet instead of the actual data:

Airtable Example Screenshot

The goal is to combine these two columns into a third that looks and behaves exactly the same as the first two, simply with the data from both combined, into one. As easy as this feels like it should be, every single option I’ve seen either turns the output into text strings (which renders it useless for our tracking purposes), or else it requires a great deal of manually typing or copy-pasting the individual options of the multiple select, into the formula, one by one. It should be noted that while I have only used four Greek letters here, the actual number of entries we are working with is well over 600, and with far longer names, so such a process would be a grueling time-consumer.

Surely there must be some way to automate this?

Also note that there are a couple rows in which both columns already share one of the Greek letters - assuming that there IS a way to automate this, is there also a way to account for/deal with potential duplicates?

Thank you!

21 Replies 21

Your formula is missing a right parenthesis after the digit 2 (which means that my original formula in this thread is also missing that parenthesis! I'm correcting the formula above)

Hi Nathaniel, 

Thank you for including these detailed steps. I am trying to achieve something similar, but instead of combining two multi-select fields, I am trying to combine two multi-select user fields. What I'm finding is that the automation will display one field or the other field, but it will not combine the two. Any thoughts on why it might be breaking, or maybe it's not possible applying this towards combined User fields?