Formula for Airtable search records not working

[RCC_Training]

Hi all,

I’m trying to set up a simple scenario like this:

Google Forms - watch responses >

Airtable - search records for the email address from the Google Form >

Gmail - send email if the email address is NOT found in our Airtable database

I’m not even to the “NOT” part of the scenario yet because I cannot figure out the formula to match the email from the Google Form response (purple) to our field in Airtable for {Primary email}.

I’ve tried all sorts of different syntax for both the {Primary email} field and the Forms Respondent Email field, but nothing seems to work. The output for the Airtable module is just all of the records in that view, with the formula for all the operations = 1, which is definitely not true. (one of the email addresses from Google Forms is not in our Airtable view)

Furthermore, when I use the formula above and select “run this module only,” the formula that displays seems to automatically put the quotations in the wrong place. I think the second quotation mark should come before the equals sign and not after {Primary email}.

I’ve read through many of the other discussions on searching Airtable records but can’t seem to find a solution for our scenario. Does anyone have any thoughts?

Thank you!

Emily

[Donald_Mitchell]

Hello Emily and Welcome to the Make Community!

With Airtable, I’ve always found it helpful to create the formula in Airtable first then copy that over to Make. After copying, just be sure to replace your search string with a mapped variable (Respondent Email) and use single quotes around strings, which means you’ll likely end up with single quote around your variable.

Hopefully that made sense and hope it helps!

[samliew]

Welcome to the Make community!

Based on the description below the formula field, looks like all you need in it is something like

{Primary email} = '{{1.respondent_email}}'

Replace {{1.respondent_email}} with the variable.

Hope this helps! Let me know if there are any further questions or issues.

— @samliew
_{P.S.: investing some effort into the tutorials in the Make Academy will save you lots of time and frustration using Make!}

[mr.G]

Hi @RCC_Training

What may be happening is that the formula you’re building is mixing two different things:

1. Make formula syntax → this is evaluated inside Make before anything is sent to Airtable.

2. Airtable formula syntax → this is what Airtable itself expects inside the Formula field of the Search Records module.

Right now, the string you’re sending is not a valid Airtable formula once Make substitutes the values, which is why Airtable returns an unexpected result.

What you want instead

Your formula in the module should be written as an Airtable expression, and only inject the Google Forms email value with Make:

{Primary email} = "{{1.Respondent Email}}"

That way:

• {Primary email} → is the Airtable field name (must match exactly).

• "{{1.Respondent Email}}" → Make will insert the actual email string here before sending the formula to Airtable.

From here, on the right-hand side (inside the quotation marks), you can also add Make functions like IF(), if you need to transform the incoming value before comparing

After you get the results from the search, you can use the next module to filter or add some logic based on whether the record was found or not.