Natively identify and/or merge duplicate items

It would be incredibly helpful to have a built-in option to highlight - or even better, merge automatically, duplicate items/items that match in a column.
Working on setting up a customer support board and the only big drawback is that i’m getting a new item created when someone replies when I just want it to create an update and change a status. I might have figured something out, but this still brings up the need for a “merge duplicates” or “nest duplicates” feature

I’d like the ability to merge two or more pulses that are the same or very similar.

My main use case: we have a board we use as a sort of CRM to keep track of volunteers. We have a public Form for people to sign up as volunteers that feeds into this board, which also asks about things like their availability, skills, and interests. Sometimes we will manually add a volunteer directly to the board with minimal information (eg, if they expressed interest through a phone call, or if they signed up for an event through a third-party service). And sometimes, after we do that, the same volunteer will find the form and sign up again, only with more information on everything the Form asks for. In other cases, people will sign up a second time with more or different information, for example if they forgot they’d already signed up.

I’d like a way to merge these duplicate volunteers in a way that maximizes the amount of information we have, and prioritizes more recent info over old info. If I could do this, then we could keep/update all our volunteer’s information while also retaining all the updates on their old pulse.

This functionality would also be helpful in something like a task/to-do list, for example when someone on my team assigns me to a new/duplicate version of a task that I had already created for myself, and I want to keep details from either/both tasks in one pulse.

I second this. In general the user needs a way to be able to select any number of items and merge them into one and retain activity and comments. Same as most help desk systems.

There is now an app for this! Data Clean was recently approved and added to the Apps Marketplace here: https://www.monday.com/marketplace/118

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Great suggestion by @PolishedGeek but if you would like to merge your duplicate items either automatically or manually you can use the Duplicates and Uniques app, which allows you to create templates and run them as integrations, thereby merging items automatically.

You can read more about it in the community post here. For any other questions or information, you can reach us at support@kolaai.com

Currently the Merge function allows the user to keep one item and archive the other(s). It would be more useful to have the option to truly merge two items. For example, one listing for a contact has an email, the second has a phone number. I would like to see Monday merge the data into a single contact.

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Yes, the “merge duplicates” functionality is practically useless at the moment. The only thing that’s actually merged are the updates, all other column values aside from the record marked as “keep” are simply dropped/archived.

What should happen is the record marked as keep should be given priority, but any blank column values should be filled in using data from the other duplicates. That would make the “merge duplicates” functionality perfect. As it is now, it’s only real use is to identify duplicates, but it gives no aid in merging them