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?

[UNIX_TELEFONICA]

+1 for me too! This would be a very interesting feature to implement.

[albertineq]

+1 this feature seems necessary.

Airtable folks, please post a workaround here if there is one available. Thanks!

[Mar_Castro]

+1 pretty please!! I have the same problem and I can’t find a workaround.

[Mark_Sorenson]

+1. This seems like one of those low effort/high delight features. Seems like an easy win for the product team. Let’s keep this thread fresh!

[Sean_Christense]

+1 for me as well! I’ve had multiple use cases where this comes up. Thanks!

[Oliver_Holtz]

I know I posted in this topic before, but I keep running into this annoying problem. Structuring my research database would be so much easier if it wasn’t for this issue. Why would you ever want to have duplicates in a lookup field?

[ScottWorld]

I agree that the Airtable engineers dropped the ball with this one, and sadly, they seem to be unresponsive to user feedback like the comments in this thread.

There is one partial workaround to this dilemma, but it doesn’t provide the full functionality of lookup fields (which have now become clickable items in Airtable):

Removing duplicates from a string Formulas

Oh wow, thanks so much, @kuovonne! What an incredible revelation!! :slight_smile: Yep, that fixed it for me! :slight_smile: This is extremely unintuitive & unexpected behavior to me! @Mar_Castro To make this work, you have to go back into your OTHER table, and create an additional lookup field. This is, in essence, a redundant field, but as @kuovonne has pointed out, this is required to make this work. You’ll be creating a lookup field that is based on your linked record field, but it is looki…

[Sticker_ninja]

Would be great to have this feature.

[Adam_Minich]

Hello community!

Adam from the Airtable customer support team here. I had an Airtable user reach out with a link to this community post. While I can’t speak to a specific timeframe for when this feature might be available I have a workaround that may help.

I used the Recipe, Ingredients, and food type example from earlier in the thread. Also, you will need to have some comfort with our Automations feature in order to use this method:

[DavidVM]

Although it doesn’t resolve the underlying issue, I found this to be very useful.

Thanks for posting!