Is there a way to sort chronologically?

Do you have a “date” field that you want to sort, or do you want to sort records in order of “created time”?

Would adding an “autonumber” type field be sufficient for your purposes?

Ah yeh sorry, I should have explained my use case in more detail. I have a “date” field that I want to sort.

Specifically, it’s an expenses sheet with a “Date paid” column, which I’d like to sort from oldest to newest.

Hum, I don’t think so. I tried reading up on autonumbers and date fields and as far as I can tell that’s not what I’m after.

Select the field for sorting and there will be an option to sort ascending or descending on iOs and on a browser app, just use a-z or z-a. Seems to work for me. Perhaps I’m still misunderstanding your question, or maybe you want a clearer labeling on the browser version?

If your field is of type “Date” then sorting “1-9” will sort the records chronologically.

Im having trouble with this also. When i sort 1-9, it ignores the year altogether and only sorts by the first number in the date field.

This can be easy or tricky. If you have a date field, it’s easier, but you have to format your date the way you want to sort. So – July 10, 2017 vs 7/10/2017, and 2017-07-10 may yield very different results.

Add to that the fact that some of your dates might really be stored as strings if you used the DATE_FORMAT or similar function. Then the three date formats above may be ordered differently.

My workaround is to create new fields for any date field I need to sort/group. (I create the new field right next to the actual date field and then hide the new field. That way i don’t have a bunnch of wierd fields at the end of my base that i’m unsure what they are.)

My new date fields use DATETIME_FORMAT (<>, “MM” & “(MMMM, YYYY)”. They look like this: 07 (July, 2017). This works for my quarterly reports which are sorted by payment date and grouped by month.

To accomodate any sorting or grouping, just re-shuffle the datetime format to however you need to sort or group - putting day, year, or month, or quarter in whatever position you need. You can make new fields for each of your date fields and datetime format them accordingly.

Conceivably you could sort all your records by day of week, then by quarter, then by month and day. But remember, if you make a field by day of week Airtable will alphabetize. IF you want to show by the regular order, you have to make it 00 Sunday, 01 Monday, etc. Otherwise you’ll get:

…
Sunday
Thursday
Tuesday
Wednesday (new field)
Q1 (new field)
01 (Jan 2017) new field
…

A year has gone by so I thought I’d check to confirm that chronological sorting is now available?

I am evaluating Airtable for heavy duty use. It’s such a basic requirement of a database it would be strange if it is not an available function.

Same here. I can’t believe we can’t sort chronologically by date. You can sort a-z or 1-9 but that doesn’t work for dates. For example, sorting dates 1-9 yields:
1/15/2017
1/25/2018
2/10/2018
2/15/2017
etc
I ignores the year

That’s not what I get when I sort by date at all.

When I sort by a “Date” field by 1 -> 9:

I get appropriate sorting by Year, Month, Day:

Yes, you can sort by date. This was killing me, too. Set your date format to:
ISO (2019-01-22), that’ll make the sort work properly. Then you can autonumber if you need to enforce a sort by item added.

But it doesn’t work the same for pivot tables and charts

I’m trying to sort by date as pictured below and it’s clearly not working. What am I doing wrong? The numbers don’t change whether I do 1-9 or 9-1…

I removed the grouping, then sorted by in home dates and then re grouped by customer which gave me the result I was looking for.

Hopefully this continues to work as I add to the table!

Thanks for your assistance!