When importing data, if the item already exists, the original data will be wiped out if there’s new information in the same column. Ex: Mr. A already exists and there’s information in Notes column. If we want to update the Notes column through an import (because there are hundreds of items that need to be updated), the original information in Mr. A’s Notes column is wiped out and replaced with new information. Much better is to have the information in the column truly merged. We are always adding names of attendees to conferences, but often the same people will be on both the Monday (existing) list and the ones we’re importing. We want to add new information but not wipe out the original. Would save hours and hours of de-duping time.
You can use the Duplicates and Uniques app for this.
Here is a demo of how the merge functionality works.
In your case, for the “Notes” column, you can select the option to join and how to join, for example, using a comma as shown in the screenshot.
Hello @MyrnaW,
This is a common pain point. Instead of overwriting, the import tool should support merging column values—especially for fields like Notes or Attendees. A smart merge (e.g. appending new data with a delimiter) would save hours of manual cleanup and preserve historical context. Definitely worth prioritizing as a feature request.
Best Regards,
Julie Batson
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Hey! Alfred’s solution is the right call for this if your attendee names match exactly between lists. I think that app handles the join/don’t overwrite problem well.
One edge case where you’d need something different is when the same person appears with name variations (‘John Smith’ vs ‘J. Smith’ vs. John A. Smith’). Monday’s deduplication won’t catch those since it relies on exact matching. For that scenario, you’d want to clean/merge the data before importing using a tool that can do fuzzy/semantic matching. (Full disclosure, this is what I work on, but if you have this issue, you can test it out free at: Merge - Join datasets with no matching key | everyrow). But if your names are consistent, stick with the native app since that would be simpler. Hope this helps!