I have a scenario that puts new clients from Acuity Scheduling into a Google Sheet, after first checking that they’re not already in the Sheet using a Search Rows module filtered by first, last, email and phone. This somehow thought a recent client named Nouhaila was 14 different other clients and overwrote their names and emails with hers:
Thank goodness for Sheets cell edit history or I’d have no way of knowing which clients were overwritten!
Question is, why those rows and how to prevent recurring?
The same rows were subsequently overwritten with another client, Margo, so it’s something she and Nouhaila have in common that’s triggering a false match.
Weird, this is all it’s filtering on. Must be something about the trim function?
Got it: it was all the ones with blank phones!
Filtered by Margo’s name, they’re all blank and blank has been replaced with another blank by the automation:
To confirm, filtered by phone column and the only blanks were those same records:
To prevent recurrence, made it match on (email AND first) OR (phone AND first) OR (first AND last) instead of just email OR phone OR (first AND last) . This would have prevented the Nouhaila and Margo errors, but would not prevent a future error if client Joe Smith and client Joe Jones both lack an email or both lack a phone. This seems fairly unlikely, however. If anyone can think of a more foolproof solution, I’d love to hear it!