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?

[Jordan_Feinstei]

Would love this feature too!

[Josh_Martin1]

This would solve a big problem for us. The user @David_Krizan posted a screenshot that would solve all our problems. It’s been several years and we haven’t had any movement on this topic.

[David_Krizan]

Come on Airtable, throw me a freakin’ switch! I (and many others) have been asking for this for over 3 years now! There’s been a US presidential election and a global pandemic in the interim, and all we’re asking for here is a wee little switch that does the ARRAYUNIQUE() function.

In case y’all forgot…

[F-Law_IT]

In the last two days I’ve implemented about six instances of the whole lookup—>rollup—>automated multiselect field. At an overhead of extra fields and at least two automations per.

Seems there are a bunch of other commonsense features that are missing, and complained of for just as long… :triumph:

(Some of which mirror this one, in that you need to use this trick to work around them. Like teasing items out of a multiselect into discrete single selects, so you can generate a kanban; rather than being able to specify which value in multi-select to use as the key when creating the stacked view…)

[F-Law_IT]

Is it correct that the rollup & automated entry on update workaround only functions for entering items into a choice select field, but not into a multiple link field? Even if the string matches when manually typing it into the link field?

Like so:

If it matters, the Entry Grid is pulling from the Sync Grid in their mutual origin base and they are both sync’d to this destination base.

The project here is adapting Airtable’s sample “legal analysis” template so each instance of the template can draw upon a common source base relating points of law to their supporting cases and code sections.

The original discussion of this technique was talking about input to linked item fields, not choice fields, so I’m not sure what’s up with the behavior I’m seeing. I did have to use SUBSTITUTE(ARRAYJOIN(ARRAYUNIQUE(values)), '"', '') in the rollup to strip the quotation marks that appear when manipulating sync’d data, as opposed to just ARRAYUNIQUE(values) – does that have something to do with it?

The log appears to indicate permission errors, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense…

"Updating the record failed due to insufficient permissions.
Learn how to fix common issues…

You first, Airtable.

[Kevin_Moreau]

I need this as well. Anyone knows if this feature is planned for a future update or has it been ignored all this time?

[Michael_Nations]

The lack of this feature has been a major headache for the past couple of days. There is no adequate workaround. Sure would be nice to be able to toggle a unique lookup like @David_Krizan proposed.

[Varun_Devatha]

Still facing this problem 3.5 years since the original post. After seeing the number of people requesting a fix for so long, I hope Airtable is considering prioritizing this feature. @Adam_Minich

[Andy_Seo]

+1 this feature would greatly benefit our organization as well, seems like a very intuitive thing to implement.

[Philip_Loyd1]

+1 on the request for @David_Krizan 's proposed solution to add an “Only display unique linked records” switch here. :slightly_smiling_face: