Looking for checkbox for potential duplicates

Question

Have a table of contacts (individuals) with roughly 200,000 records. For a national organization. We want people to be able to enter new individuals with similar names because there may be multiple people named John Smith. I am looking for a way to flag to me potential duplicates.

Either making a new table and some sort of summarizing data up to that table. or a checkbox formula?

I think here are the issues: we have many fields Full Name, First or Last Name etc.. I think I want to avoid Phone or email in the same lookups because people may not have entered a phone for one duplicate but did for a second one.

Potentially a few different lookups? Ones where full names are the same, one where phone numbers are the same, one where emails, one where address is the same. I could use this to narrow down the the most likly duplicates vs trying to look through 200,000 contacts.

Looking for suggestions.

Thanks Quick Base universe!

MCFNeil · Answer

Here is an idea. (Not perfect, but might help you narrow the list)

Export the entire list to excel with the: Record ID# and Email.

Use the excel function to "remove duplicates" based on the email.

Then create a new column called [Unique Email Checkbox].
After you have removed all of the duplicates, put the value of 1 in the new column.

Then Import those records back with just the RID and a new checkbox field. All your unique emails will have a checkbox checked.

....
If you do this for phone numbers and possibly full names, you could get a pretty narrow list of contacts, that don't have any checkboxes check. Now you know those are most likely duplicates, or not good information to begin with.

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