Sure. Most often it is to merge contact profiles just like in the demo:
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One client of mine had a private list of contacts, and an external doc they gave to data entry outsourcers to add more profiles from various sources. We had some live formulas in place to check if an outsourcer was entering a profile for someone who was already in the database (see solution 1 in this post), but since they didn’t have access to the private DB, they couldn’t check for duplicates against what the client already had in there. So in the end when the supplier’s data was cross-docced and copied into the private DB, there were duplicates just like in the demo — with fresher or extra data than the client already had.
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Another client of mine is importing clients from Mailchimp. Again, they already have a lot of clients in their Coda table, and many overlap. Instead of building a dedicated logic to “add or modify” from the Mailchimp import table, I decided to implement it this way: we copy each row (and create missing tags as we go) but in the end of such import a duplicate check is run and the data is then merged. Ultimately the client will bring in more data sources for contacts, and we won’t have to rebuild the dupe&merge functionality again.
So yeah, so far it’s mostly for contact books, CRMs and so on. If you can come up with any other ways to use this, I’d be happy to know 