The word "STUPID"

[Carol_Coventry]

I had the word ‘STUPID’ show up as the last name of one of my customers. (I have no customers with that last name.) It showed in bold up on top of the record, but not in the field, LAST NAME. The customer’s correct name was listeded in the LAST NAME field. The comment section on the right did not note that anyone had changed the name to STUPID. When I went back to check the customer’s name on the main list of customers, STUPID was no longer showing up anywhere.

I feel like someone was messing things up in back of the record. There are only 4 employees who use Airtable in my office. Any ideas?

[Mohamed_Swella1]

Hi @Carol_Coventry,

Welcome to Airtable Community! :slightly_smiling_face:

Im trying to understand what might have happened, how can a word be in bold on top of the Last Name? This is not something that you can do in Airtable anyhow. Was it a field description maybe? In this case, you can check the history of the field from the History icon on the top right, it can tell you who changed the field description.

Let me know what you find :slightly_smiling_face:

BR,
Mo

[Carol_Coventry]

MO

Thanks for getting back to me. I did check “History” on this file and there was no mention of anyone changing the last name. Is this the area when you mentioned to check “in the top right hand corner”? The fact that when I returned to the main page of the customer base, it no longer said “Stupid” for the customer’s last name, but the correct name, was confusing to me. I keep checking, but haven’t seen anything odd since.

BR

Carol C.

[Justin_Barrett]

Carol_Coventry:

It showed in bold up on top of the record, but not in the field, LAST NAME.

Do you have any formulas that combine the last name with other pieces, for example to build elements for use in Page Designer? Formulas can’t output markup (well, they can, but it’s not recognized as such), so the only place I can think of where a name would be in bold is in a report, which is why I’m guessing Page Designer.

Anyway, if you’ve got a formula that builds the full name from the first and last names, it’s possible that the formula field was modified by one of your employees to output “Stupid” for one particular person’s last name. Unfortunately, Airtable doesn’t keep a history of changes to formula fields, only to manually-editable fields.

The only way I can think of to possibly see what happened is to pull out a snapshot from a time frame where you knew that behavior was occurring. That would contain the formulas used at that time, though it wouldn’t tell you who changed the one affecting the name output.

[Carol_Coventry]

Hi, Justin…thank you for getting back to me. I personally did not put in any formulas (that I know of). I am fairly new to all the “bells and whistles” of Airtable so am not sure what putting in a formula would entail. I was advised to check to see who all had permissions to our bases. As far as I know, only a few since we only have 5 staff at our non-profit. What bothers me most, is the word, STUPID. Who would do that and why?

Stay safe and again, thank you!

Carol Coventry