[SOLVED] Automatic sorting in views

Yes - my vote too! Many thanks!

This would be very useful for me. I am used to databases that autosort, and it’s very confusing that Airtable doesn’t. Surely just applying the sort when a view is opened (or accessed from a form) would be enough?

+1 this would be really helpful.

+1 To this (same as persistent sort thread linked above) Persistent sorting of a view

Shoot, no auto sorting is a big feature hole… and no progress since December 2015. We need to have our table sort in reverse chronological order, the way most email inboxes function. Unfortunately, lack of this feature pretty much kills our use of the product. Thanks for the otherwise fine product, tho – if we can find other uses for AirTable, we will!

Auto-sorting update from the Airtable team:

We’d like to announce a small feature that you may find useful for keeping views sorted. You can now Apply Sorts from our web and desktop apps using the keyboard: Ctrl-Shift-S (Cmd-Shift-S on Mac) to open the sort dialog, followed by Enter to apply sorts.

And don’t worry, we hear you on how useful full auto-sorting would be. We’re exploring the possibility of supporting in in the future. If so, it may take some time as we’d like for it to be intuitive and consistent across all Airtable apps and view types. We hope that the above keyboard shortcut is helpful in the meantime.

Auto-sorting update from the Airtable team:

We’d like to announce a small feature that you may find useful for keeping views sorted. You can now Apply Sorts from our web and desktop apps using the keyboard: Ctrl-Shift-S (Cmd-Shift-S on Mac) to open the sort dialog, followed by Enter to apply sorts.

And don’t worry, we hear you on how useful full persistent sorting would be. We’re exploring the possibility of supporting in in the future. If so, it may take some time as we’d like for it to be intuitive and consistent across all Airtable apps and view types. We hope that the above keyboard shortcut is helpful in the meantime.

I certainly understand the complications of an autosort feature. It seems to me this could be accomplished by having reports. When you pull up a report view, the information would be sorted. You could determine whether you wanted the view to autoupdate or not. Since the report would be read only, the autosort feature would not create problems for the underlying data and collaborators.

The answer seems really clear to me.

When the sort dropdown is active, put a little checkbox at the bottom that says ‘Refresh sorting order each time the view is loaded’.

When we load up a specific view, specifically one where we’ve already pre-determined how we’d like it to be grouped and sorted, it doesn’t make sense why we would have to click the “Sort” button and hit ‘apply’ every time in order to update the sort view.

Can we make this a dynamic process where when the view loads, it automatically looks at the sort and ‘applies’ those settings right away?

Please and Thank you!

A vote in support of this feature.

We use customised grid views that we share with partners so that they can see the (in our case) recordings that are coming up over the next period, sorted by record date.

The autosort would make this service that much nicer / more reliable to the eye.

This would be helpful; when adding a new member to my list, it would automatically place them where they belonged alphabetically, rather than me having to sort again. I like the idea!

Bump.

Would be very useful to have persistent sorting. Right now it is a very manual process since you have to go to each table and each view to manually sort - in reality it doesn’t get done and then people don’t trust the data.

Bumping this again as it would super appreciated!

It seems a development oversight to not have auto sort. Airtable allows users to keep track of things in a collaborative setting. It’s not just one person keeping track of things on a spreadsheet. Auto sort is a must for group sanity. Sorry to be kind of heavy but really, it’s a basic need out of the box.

Does anyone know if there IS a product that has auto sort?

+1 for persistent sorting (especially because sorting has been offered as a workaround for another feature request: filtering data on linked fields. Thanks @Matt_Bush for checking in. Looking forward to an update!

Please, consider this feature!

This exactly sums up how I feel about this, particularly on group sanity.

Wanted to mention my company’s need for autosort. I would like to have a checkbox for each particular tab to enable autosort.

For example:

We are an Mechanical contracting company that keeps track of the equipment we work on, and keep a table that is sorted by the location and designated number of the unit. As technicians add equipment to the list through a form, the new items are put at the bottom of the list gradually creating a mess that someone at the office has to resolve by going in and manually resorting the list. The technicians have view only access to the list through the web hyperlink and are unable to do it themselves as we don’t want to grant full access to our company database to every single employee we have (because that could end in disaster)

Auto sorting is a no brainer in many cases, and in situations where it doesn’t work (ie collaboration) a check box to turn it off would do just fine. We can already have entries auto filter, I’m a little confused about why this would be different.

But I’m no programmer of course!

Thank you,

bump. any updates on this? Would love a persistent sort.

Could you explain why it’s a tough engineering problem? If people aren’t continuously resorting new data sets, it doesn’t seem computing-intensive.

Yes! Need ability to keep a sort! I use this for membership directories. When a new record is added I have to make sure it is sorted all the time to show the companies in order.

Definitely need this. I’ve got a form for people to add items to the database and the idea that it doesn’t auto-sort those is chaotic.

Yes, this! And here are the rest of the words needed to send this post.

+1 for this. I see this missing piece from the first time I started using it. It’s a must-have.