Remove duplicates in look up field

[Mathias_Elmose]

I’m a big fan of look-ups but I would really like to be able to remove records the occur more than one time. Is there a way to do that?

[CodeKnight]

Yes i need this feature, Please add it.

This solution explained solves my use case as well. I am linking tasks to multiple projects and want a lookup field that displays a unique set of links instead of duplicate links

[Jean_Mertz]

I came here looking for a similar solution. I hope this comment can be regarded as an extra +1 when evaluating the importance of this feature.

[Paulina_Lopez]

Definitely a needed feature that will make tracking data a lot easier and improve workflow, which is what Airtable is designed to do, right?

The reason I need this feature is, in my accounting base for my business, I have a table of my business assets. It is linked to my business expenses which shows the transactions when I purchased the assets. I wanted to add a lookup field to the assets table for the “cost” field of the business expenses, which would, theoretically, tell me the total value of my business assets. The reason it doesn’t, however, is because some transactions include more than one asset, so both assets link to the same transaction, and the lookup returns duplicate dollar amounts, resulting in an inflated total.

If I had the option to “only display unique records”, this would not happen, and the sum of the lookup column would actually reflect the equity in my business assets.

Without this feature, I would have to manually enter the value of each asset, based on the corresponding transaction record. Which, is not worth the time or effort.

With all the other things Airtable can do and makes easy to just add a column to get a new stat, it’s disappointing that such a simple feature with so many applications, already available in other field types, is overlooked.

[Jeremie_POUTRIN]

Hi Airtable product people,

I need this to cluster information together for a complex impact analysis.

the proposed solution seems fair with the little toggle.
the exposition in a formula is also cool if it does not destroy the lookup link like the ARRAYUNIQUE does today.

just for our information, how is the feature election process working?
Have you disregarded that request as it’s floating around for around 2years?

[Ivan_Sarmiento]

Yes! this is a very needed feature.

[Subhas_Dandapan]

• What’s the use of showing the exact same “clickable link” twice in the same field? I mean, we cannot remove or add or interact with linked records other than clicking it, and if all those clicks lead to the same place – then why show the same link mulitple times?
• => Why should there even be a “Don’t show duplicates” checkbox for linked fields?
• => Should this be treated as a feature or a bug?

To me it feels like a Bug in the Linked Records field. It creates side effects – try “grouping” by a Lookup field, and see it grouped by the same linked record many times over with headings like “LinkA LinkB LinkA LinkA” “LinkA LinkA LinkB LinkA” … creating a nasty permutation of groups.

Is there a way to file a bug report?

[DavidVM]

Are you still able to see the “only display unique linked records” option?

I can’t see it when I structure my lookup field. Is it possible they removed this option when they added the conditional lookups?

Can anyone confirm if the option to “only display unique linked records” is still there? Thanks!

[DavidVM]

Whoops. I thought that was an actual screenshot. I guess I need to read a little more carefully…

[Rebecca_Ratnam]

I just ran into this problem, too. Hoping to see a solution soon. In them mean time is there a workaround?

[David_Krizan]

Yeah, that was just my mockup of my proposed solution. It would seem like this would be to implement, especially given that they just added conditional filtering to lookup fields. The need for this feature keeps coming up, so it’s frustrating that it hasn’t been addressed yet.