If you’ve ever worked in Airtable and found yourself staring at a mess of inconsistently labeled entries, you’re not alone. Maybe it’s movies—Blade Runner, Blade Runner Director’s Cut, Blade Runner (Final Cut)—all technically the same film, but scattered across your base like rogue replicants. Or maybe you’ve got a list of city programs that somehow ended up as Youth Basketball Program, U18 Basketball Program, and Basketball for Youth Program. Different names, same thing. And when your data looks like that, comparing or analyzing anything becomes a huge headache—especially as your dataset grows.
I feel your pain. I’ve spent a good chunk of time wrangling this exact problem while building Movie Title Grouper, a tool that handles these messy duplicates for movie titles specifically. Along the way, I experimented with all kinds of grouping methods—some clever, some chaotic, some surprisingly effective.
In this post, I’ll walk you through some of the best techniques I found, along with their perks, pitfalls, and ideal use cases. We’ll start with the simplest approaches and build up to the more powerful ones. Let’s tame that chaos!
Dedupe
This is the first option you should consider—think of it as the low-hanging fruit of the near-duplicate world. Dedupe is a built-in Airtable extension that’s simple, clean, and gets the job done when your duplicates are obvious.
If you’ve got five slightly different versions of the same record, Dedupe lets you pick the one you want to keep—and toss the others out. Like spring cleaning for your base.
To use it, just add the Dedupe extension, choose the field you want to scan for duplicates, and enable fuzzy matching to catch those not-quite-exact matches.
✅ Benefits:
- You get full control to manually choose the best record
- Free
- Super easy to set up
⚠️ Limitations:
- Deletes records, which might not always be ideal
- Fuzzy matching is a bit basic—not great for tricky variations
Correct Spelling via a Script
If your data isn’t too messy and the only problem is a handful of spelling errors, this is a quick fix. A script can go through your records, clean up the typos, and make sure everything matches. After it runs, any records that differ only by spelling mistakes will be exactly the same!
Here’s how to set it up in a few simple steps:
- Grab the Script: Copy the script from this repository.
- Paste it in Airtable: Open the Scripting extension in your Airtable base and paste the code there.
- Select Your Table and Fields: Set up the script by selecting the table and the fields you want to correct.
- Get the API Key: Sign up for a free API key from here.
- Run the Script: Hit Run in the extension, and watch it work its magic!
After it runs, you should see all the records with corrected spellings.
✅ Benefits:
- Fully automated—let the script do the work for you!
- Free
⚠️ Limitations:
- You’ll need to get an API key (a bit of a hassle, but easy enough)
- The script can sometimes make unexpected corrections—for example, “bakien” could turn into “baking” instead of “bacon”
- Due to rate limits, it may take some time to process all your records
- You might need to run it multiple times due to time limits in the Script extension
Fuzzy Matching via a Script
Shoutout to the redditor who inspired this idea—thank you! This method goes through your records and finds text that’s similar, even if it’s not an exact match. It uses something called the Levenshtein algorithm, which calculates how many edits are needed to turn one word into another. For example, “grouper” and “group” have a distance of two because you’d remove an “e” and an “r” to make them match. When the script identifies texts that are close enough, it groups them together.
Here’s how to set it up:
- Create a Group Field: This is where your group names will go.
- Grab the Script: Copy the code from this repository and paste it into the Script extension.
- Run the Code: Let the script do its magic.
- Group by the Group Name Field: Voilà—your records are grouped!
✅ Benefits:
- It’s all done automatically
- Free
- Your original data stays intact
- No API key needed
⚠️ Limitations:
- It might miss big differences, like “Birdman” and “Birdman (or the Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)”—they’re the same movie, but the algorithm won’t always catch that
- Due to time limits, it may not work for larger tables
Clean Up Using AI
If you’re wrangling data on well-known entities like movies, books, or TV shows, this could be your golden ticket. Think of it as a mix of the previous two methods, but with a modern AI twist. You can use Airtable’s new AI features to process your text, then group the cleaned-up data with ease.
Here’s how to make it happen:
- Create a Long Text Field: Call it “Group Name” and enable AI for this field.
- Pick a Low-Cost Model: Choose an affordable AI model for the task.
- Tell the AI What to Do: Set up instructions for how the AI should process the field. For messy movie titles, for example: “Take {Title} and give me the full, official title of the film. Remove any mention of the year or version.” This way similar texts should generate the same official title.
- Generate the Values: Let the AI work its magic and process your records.
- Group by the “Group Name” Field: Boom, your records are grouped with the clean titles.
✅ Benefits:
- Fully automated cleanup
- Keeps your original data intact
- No API key needed
⚠️ Limitations:
- Works best with well-known entities like movies or books
- Costs $6/month for the AI add-on
Summary:
- Need to remove duplicates? Use Dedupe—simple and effective.
- Got some spelling errors? Run the spell-checking script to clean up those typos.
- Want to group similar texts with minimal effort? Try the fuzzy matching script for quick results.
- Looking for more advanced processing? Let Airtable’s AI text field work its magic for cleaner, more polished data.
Conclusion:
There’s still a lot to explore, like vector embeddings, search engines, and other advanced algorithms that would need you to host your own code. But don’t worry—we’ve got you covered! If you need help organizing and cleaning up your database, just reach out to us at hello@bluepocket.ca. We can help you implement these techniques and get all organized!