Issue with Counting Linked Records in Airtable

[J_J_Moncus]

Question: I have a collaborator field with numerous collaborators per record, and I was hoping to add a field that would add up how many collaborators there are listed in that record. How would I do this?
Thank you!

[Wim_Benoot]

I have the same question here. Have you found a solution by now?

Regards

[W_Vann_Hall · Accepted solution]

After kicking this around for a while, I discovered @Simon_Brown had posted a workaround a year ago:

IF( LEN(Collaborator) = 0, 0, LEN(CONCATENATE(",", Collaborator)) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(Collaborator, ",", "")))

Only caveat is that none of your collaborator names can have an embedded comma. (I fiddled around some with ARRAYJOIN() in hopes of using an alternative separator character, but Airtable’s insistence on stringifying anything that’s not a text, number, or date field prevents that.) It’s ugly, but it seems to work pretty well on multi-selects, attachments, and any field allowing multiple values – with the comma caveat, as well.

[Wim_Benoot]

Works like a charm! thanks for the help, would have never been able to solve myself :slightly_smiling_face:

[Aurelien_Poma]

W_Vann_Hall:

IF( LEN(Collaborator) = 0, 0, LEN(CONCATENATE(",", Collaborator)) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(Collaborator, “,”, “”)))

Thanks for that, very useful!

I don’t get why COUNTALL() can’t do that job. Any second with Airtable frustrates me :frowning: