Dedupe Records
complete
B
Brian Fung
Dedupe Records. Airtable and Salesforce have the ability to have the system search for duplicate records within a table: for example, duplicate names, phone numbers, email addresses, etc. The system recognizes duplicates and can suggest to merge/delete records. The user can go in and "dedupe" the records by selecting the master record and then select which fields from the duplicate records you want to merge to the master record. This is very powerful for CRM systems.
A
Avi Hercenberg
Update:
Our team is starting to work on this feature. We are having a group feedback call tomorrow at 12:15 EST to discuss some options. If you'd like to join the call please let me know.
Jon Darbyshire
complete
We have implemented a new Merge Action in automation that supports this capability.
A
Avi Hercenberg
planned
A
Avi Hercenberg
Update:
Our team is starting to work on this feature. We are having a group feedback call tomorrow at 12:15 EST to discuss some options. If you'd like to join the call please let me know.
A
Avi Hercenberg
Merged in a post:
Add a dedupe widget to our dashboards
Benjamin Bachman
Add a dedupe widget to help you find and manage duplicate records in an App. You can delete duplicates or merge individual fields from duplicate records together.
Here is how airtable supports this:
Brandi Bullock
Please for the love of everything data... hope this is coming soon!
Jon Darbyshire
Benjamin Bachman I wanted to let you know that we had an internal discussion this week on how we could support this for you. We are adding an new Widget grouping of Utilities this week for the Solution Data Schema - and this may also be a good place for us to add this feature. I will be back soon with more details. I am also moving the status of this to Planned to let you know we working to figure this out.
Benjamin Bachman
Jon Darbyshire: I really appreciate it!
Benjamin Bachman
Jon Darbyshire: just tugging back on this... is this going to be a reality anytime soon? Our communication is back from February on this.
Jon Darbyshire
Brian Fung.Thank you for sharing this request. I want to make sure that you are also aware that we provide the ability for each field type to enable a "Value must be unique" flag that ensures when entering data that you are not duplicating data. Our goal is to catch this during the input process so you don't have to worry about a "Depude" process.
However, I do understand that it would also be useful to many customers to have a Depude feature.
B
Brian Fung
Jon Darbyshire: Mahalo for your response Jon. I have a bunch of work that gets outsourced to VAs which requires them to fill out a lot of forms that feed into my database. this tends to result in a need for me do dedupe roughly 20 records per week but it takes less than 5 minutes for the whole process because of this dedupe feature. Can SmartSuite's Forms prevent duplicates from entering a table without the form submitter being able to access the data?
Jon Darbyshire
Brian Fung: Thanks for sharing the use case as this is helpful. No, forms are not able to prevent duplicate data. I will start reviewing the UI of how other products offer a Depude feature. Are you happy with the Airtable UI you shared above or do you have any thoughts on improving this?
B
Brian Fung
Jon Darbyshire: mahalo for the response Jon. The only issue I have is that there are certain fields in AirTable's UI that will not merge over due to field type. For example:
- I cannot merge 2 phone numbers to a contact i.e. If primary phone on one duplicate is different from primary phone on the primary record, I cannot merge the primary phone from the duplicate to a SECONDARY PHONE field on the primary record. Airtable.
- email is the same issue
- for notes, I have my VAs fill in general comments about a contact and when I dedupe I have to manually open records to copy and paste info from one to the other instead of Joining the notes together like an ArrayJoin function would do.
Hopefully this is helpful.