Count the number of entries in a column across multiple records.

[danielmee]

New to Airtable here and trialling to see if I can work out a solution for my department.

I have two bases, one that tracks People and the other that tracks Activities. Within Activities are fields for 'Participants', 'Facilitators' and 'Guests'. Multiple people can be added to each field.

I am trying to create an interface that shows a count of how many people there were across all activities in the participant's column. However, I can only seem to get it to count how many activities there were to have any participants, which is a different number.

I can see the next trap would also be that, if I was able to get it to count items within a column, it would count them regardless if they were original or not. This is desirable sometimes but it would be good to only count unique entries across multiple activities because often the same people attend multiple activities. How do I effectively say "count unique entries within the participants' column for all activities"?

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hi Daniel, any chance you could provide some example data and the output you'd want?  I'd love to help but I don't think I fully understand how the data's set up and what you'd like to see, sorry!

[danielmee]

Thanks Adam,

Lets start with three records in the Activity table and three people in the People table (Kerry, Quinn and Liam).

Activity	Participants
Journalism Workshop	Liam, Kerry
Misinformation Expert Talk	Kerry
Reporting in the Courts Training	Liam, Kerry, Quinn

The number of all participants in all records of the Activity table is six. However, in interface designer, I can't work out how to ask that question. The configurations I can see only allow me to ask, "How many records in the Activity table had participants", to which the answer is three because every record had data in the participants column.

[TheTimeSavingCo · Accepted solution]

Ah, I see.  `Participants` is a linked field I take it? 

If so, you could create a `Count` field inside the `Activity` table, and then in your interface have a Number element that sums that?

[danielmee]

Genius! Thanks so much 👍