Nov 06, 2021 06:40 AM
Seeking help
I am involved with a project providing holiday gifts for disadvantaged kids.
I have a table named Kids, which is populated by others with info on gift ideas per kid. Entry via online Airtable form.
Yesterday I exported the data to a csv file for use in a mail merge operation. I proudly examined the output when I noticed some records with clearly wrong data in some fields. Yikes!
The cause, I found, was some fields were filled with items that included commas. This messed up the alignment of the comma-delimited input file for the mail merge.
So I determined how to identify the faulty records. I duplicated my Airtable table of 156 records, and did a filter on fields with commas. This gave me a list of 67 records. I performed a find/replace on them, replacing all the commas with periods.
Here is my puzzle: the original Kids table somehow synced with the duplicate, which now means that it no longer has 156 kids…. But only 67.
The good news is that I still have my exported CSV, so the data can be replicated… and I can re-do yesterday’s 4 hours,
Thanks for thoughts on finding the missing records’ table.
Nov 06, 2021 07:10 AM
What do you mean you did a “find and replace”? Airtable doesn’t offer a “find and replace” feature.
To get back to your full list of records, you would need to remove the filter that you applied.
Nov 06, 2021 07:19 AM
re Find/Replace… i set up filter seeking comma in a field. Then manually edited each cell’s comma. replacing manually w period. Multiple passes, since only the first comma is caught in the filter.
FWIW, there are no filters active now.
Nov 06, 2021 07:44 AM
What caused this issue is export using comma. vs using tab as separator. If record contains a comma, CSV screws up