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Airtable offers a Dedupe Block that allows you to scrube a table of possible duplicate entries. If you want on-the-fly processing — which it sounds like you do — you can use my data deduplication routines fo0r real-time deduplication.
Both the Block and my code support ‘fuzzy’ matching. In my case, how fuzzy depends on you: You define the formula to instance {MatchKey}, so you can tailor the match to the specifics of your data. In addition, I provide a way for you to flag false-positives (that is, records that trigger the ‘duplicate?’ warning but actually represent individual items: for instance, an event of the same name but held in different locations) and to make these flags persistent, so you don’t find yourself having to clear the same group of false positives every time you deduplicate the table.
Since you’re using forms, your implementation of my routines will be even easier than if you weren’t: To trigger deduplication, every record of the table to be deduped has to be linked to one record in another table. That’s typically a [trivial but] manual process. By using form prefill, though, you can ensure every new record added through the form has the necessary link made, so the moment the user submits the form, it will be vetted for duplication.
Thanks for your reply, but this is way too complicated and too simple at the same time for what I am doing since my duplicates are very fuzzy… I’ll stick to doing it manually for now.
Thank you for this awesome guide. I just implemented the duplicate detection and it works great for the records that were already in the base, but is there a way to get it to automatically check new records that I enter?
