Not recognizing capitalization

[Mina_O]

Hello and thanks for such a great app.

I manage an outdoors activities group with hundreds of members and I’m trying to create a way to be able to run stats and store member info - A Pseudo CRM database you might say.

I know my data isn’t perfect and I’m working on cleaning it up still. However airtable isn’t recognizing that capitalized and small letter words are the same. So it’s creating multiple line items in my connected table.

t

Any fix??
Again disregard the ones in my screen shot that are not exactly the same.

Thanks!
M

[Katherine_Duh]

I don’t know the exact setup of your base, but I can give you a few suggestions.

The best way to ensure that entries with the same answers are consolidated is to use a single select dropdown field or a multiple select dropdown field instead of a single-line text field. If you have one of these field types, you can fill in answers ahead of time so that all entries have the exact same capitalization/formatting, e.g. someone will just pick “Skiing” from a dropdown menu, rather than potentially typing in “skiing,” “sking,” “Skiing…” or anything else like that.

You can’t, however, use a single/multiple select field in the primary field. Based on your screenshot, it looks like you have the name of the activity in the primary field. Usually, the primary field should contain data that is unique—people’s names, for instance. Is there a reason why you’ve put the names of the activities in the primary field?

[Mina_O]

Thanks for the response @Katherine_Duh.
In the future I will see if I can incorporate drop-down fields, I know they would be ideal. This data however is downloaded from meetup csv files and they on their site only offer you the single line text type field.

This table is actually auto created by Airtable via the - “link to another record option” from our main table. (See screen shot)
Are you recommending the primary field type here be changed?
Tnx!

[Katherine_Duh]

It depends. Do you need a separate table for information about each of the activities? If so, then it might be better to keep it as a link to another record option. If all you need to know is each person’s favorite outdoor activities, though, then it would probably be best to turn the field type into multiple select.