[SOLVED] Automatic sorting in views

And yes, our use case is release dates, and/or days overdue.

This would be so helpful having auto-sort features! I can’t think of how many times I have either been bitten, by forgetting to sort, or have wished this was an option.

I’ve been looking around for auto sort option on Airtable, and very surprise that this features have been requested for…3 years and still not yet resolved. I assume this is not about technical issue because it’s quite easy to do so. Perhaps it’s more about…some other things that Airtable don’t want this? If that the case, then users should have an explanation why…

+1 looking to get involved on this as well

+1 for this feature. @Airtable_Team any idea if/when this will happen?

Has anyone tried IFTT for this? It seems like something that should be able to be accomplished using IFTT and Airtable, but I’m not able to create something. If anyone has it, can they share?

Has this been implemented? Still don’t know how to autosort, and it looks like this request has been open for about 3 years now?

Yikes. All I can say is that the interface, as it is, is beautiful and never ever buggy. That said, 3 years for Auto-Sort? That’s crazy…

Need this badly as my finger is about to wear down with all the clicking back and forth

Yeah, I REALLY need this feature.

Just writing to express yet another person’s need for this feature! It’s very frustrating that it doesn’t auto-sort.

I would love this feature!!

Just want to reiterate a post that probably gets lost in the shuffle up there, and has a helpful little tidbit:
https://community.airtable.com/t/allow-views-to-auto-sort/162/74?u=jeremy_oglesby

Once you get the hang of using this keyboard shortcut it becomes a bit of a reflex - I’m pretty quick now at hitting cmd+shift+S and then Enter to re-apply my sort after I’ve added new records, or anytime I open up a table and I know it’s been a while since last I sorted it.

Going to see if I can try something that might put Matt’s post at the top of the thread, since it is the best solution for the time being.

To clarify, we (the Airtable team) absolutely agree that this is an important feature and one that a lot of our users could benefit from. While I cannot provide a specific timeline, I can say that auto-sorting is something our team is working on and actively discussing internally.

Thank you @Katherine_Duh. Updates like this really do mean a lot. I can not express how this issue is causing confusion and aggravation when you work with a lot of views. I mean this: to me this is not a Nice To Have solution. I am counting the hours until I see the official update news!!

Thanks @Katherine_Duh for the update! I agree with @Andre_Zijlstra, this bit me yesterday again.

I run a database of events with Airtable. I have ~10 views in which the events are sorted by deadline. Yesterday I added new -and closing soon- events and missed re-applying the sorting to one of the views. Later that day I searched for a while why I wasn’t seeing those entries at the top before I reapplied the sorting out of despair.

In this case, I knew the events should be there, but my users wouldn’t…

Tim, this happens to me in similar situations.
Teammembers would add records in a “raw” form (like concept). Soon after that I will finish all those records that I collect in a RAW view. But every once in a while I forget to sort them (Cntrol/Shift/S) and records seem to be missing. It is really awkward.
Als record are entered double by teammembers because they seem to be missing.

Count us in. We’d love to see automatic sorting. In fact, we find it counter intuitive that you have to sort each time you open a view. This would be a very useful feature.

Any updates on this?

@Katherine_Duh

Hi Katherine, the community really needs to know where Airtable is going concerning this topic. It really is of major importance. I check the " What’s new" section on a daily base just to see if there’s anything new about auto-sorting.

I appreciate the new adds in Airtable, but they would be valued way more higher if major issues like auto-sorting would be solved. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the Airtable crew works hard on every new add, but they are just appreciated less because the big issues are expected to be solved.

Regards,
André

This is a real problem for us too! To make our tables useful to people who don’t use Airtable everyday, it needs to behave as people expect. I believe that most people expect lists to be automatically sorted. When they aren’t, it causes people to think that records are missing and creates a dark sense of distrust and dissatisfaction with your product. I hope that Airtable will focus on fundamental issues like sorting and permissions rather than work arounds like locked views and new features like blocks. I like new features but we’ve been waiting years for what many people think should be basic functionality.

I’ve been experimenting with creating a view that has my records grouped by a cell that has a date/time value in descending value.

So far it seems good for those that like viewing data in the “grid view”; of course I’d like to apply this to the “kanban” and “calendar” views. For now it’s an alright alternative to manually updating the filter. Definitely excited what the team has in development!

@Chris_Mondeau Can you please double check if your view is really updated then?

What if you add a new row that hasn‘t the latest date-time? Imo the sorting will not trigger and your view will not be sorted correctly… or is it?

Hi Tim,

Can confirm, adding new records regardless of the view will auto-sort. However, it only “sorts” if you are in a grid view that is grouped by the field you want. I wouldn’t say it’s the easiest view to work out of, but could be in handy for any kind of reports/blocks.

Apparently Groups will auto-sort themselves. When @Chris_Mondeau makes a new record, and the DateTime value he is grouping on populates, the record will hover into that orange-highlighted “I’m not where I’m supposed to be” mode until he clicks off it. But once he clicks off it, that new record puts itself into a new “Group” that is properly inserted into the right place amid the other groups in the view.

Not an easy way to work, though, like he said, because each record is going to be in its own group. This means each record is going to require about 5x the space on the screen that a record in ungrouped grid view will.