Move linked records

[Michael_Eubanks]

I have a table of initials of our employees that are used to tie them to other tables. Someone accidentally created two duplicates of one one of the employees, so I have 3 rows with records linked to “CO” in the name field of each of row.

I need to unlink all of the records from the two duplicate “CO” fields and link them to the original “CO” field. Is there a way to do this easily without manually adjusting each linked record for the duplicate “CO” fields?

[Vivid-Squid]

Hi @Michael_Eubanks
There is an app in the marketplace called Dedupe that will let you merge the records. Have you tried that yet?

[kuovonne]

The Dedupe app is useful for identifying duplicate records, but it will not help if you need to merge the values in the same field.

One technique that often works is to copy the field value from all the records to be merged to a text editor. Then edit the text to merge all the lists into one big comma separated list (removing duplicates). Then paste the result back into one of the records.

Unfortunately, this will not work with your data as is because your primary field values in the linked table are not unique. You would need to make them unique first.

You could also try approaching this from the other side of the link. Make each of the “CO” records have a unique primary field. Then filter the other table to only show records that have one of those three values. Then copy/paste so that all the records in the other table have the same “CO” variant.

[ScottWorld]

kuovonne:

The Dedupe app is useful for identifying duplicate records, but it will not help if you need to merge the values in the same field.

Note that the DeDupe app does allow field merging for 2 types of fields: linked record fields and multiple select fields.

(I really wish it could handle merging for long text & single line text fields as well, but alas it does not.)

[kuovonne]

ScottWorld:

Note that the DeDupe app does allow field merging for 2 types of fields: linked record fields and multiple select fields.

Awesome! I hadn’t seen this before. Thanks for letting us know.
According to the support article this works with all fields that can contain multiple values: multiple select, multiple collaborator, linked records, and attachments.

[ScottWorld]

kuovonne:

According to the support article this works with all fields that can contain multiple values: multiple select, multiple collaborator, linked records, and attachments.

Oh, sweet! Thanks for letting me know about multiple collaborator & attachment fields, too! I didn’t know about those! :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: :raised_hands: :sparkles: