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Quickly see a list of all values in a field for filtering

  • July 28, 2022
  • 1 reply
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Is there a way to quickly see all of the different values in a field, similar to how you can click to filter on a column in Excel and see all of the possible options (similar to screenshot from Excel below)?

As an example, I have a field that is mostly blank but has a few records with varied single line text data. I want to quickly see what those different single line text lines are to see if I want to filter on any of them, but they’re not consistent enough to make it a single select field.

For another example, I have a field of various dates and would like to filter by certain dates, but don’t know all of the choices off the top of my head. Is there a way to quickly see the list of choices without creating a separate view or using a pivot table? Again, I could choose a type of ‘single select field’ but it doesn’t organize the dates nicely to see by year/month/day like you can see when clicking to filter values in Excel.
Thanks!

Best answer by Ben_Young1

Hey @Michael_W!
Welcome to the forums!

Short and simple answer: It is not possible to see all the possible values you can filter by for a single-line text field.

Presuming that you might be looking for a solution, I have a couple of suggestions for your use case.
Since it appears that you might be making the transition to Airtable from Excel/Spreadsheets/etc., something super important about working with Airtable is that treating it or comparing it to a spreadsheet will leave you frustrated, disappointed, and no longer willing to explore the platform.

Here is an example of a really flexible (and powerful) way to work with, view, and manage your data.

I created a table with 1,000 records with random date values.

Okay, so what if I want to sort them by their year?
My first thought is to leverage a formula. The date functions are amazing.
If you’re not really playing with formulas a ton, then I highly recommend
the formula field reference (and the playground). It’s incredibly helpful when learning to build formulas.

If I use the DATETIME_FORMAT function, I can quickly have Airtable tell me the year of each of the date values:

Okay, but that’s too simple. What if I want to look at more specific date values and sort/group/filter them that way?

You can tweak your formula to provide easily manageable values that you can quickly work with.

Using a bit of grouping, I can quickly organize my data into a format that I can easily filter and sort by.

There are tons of ways that you can achieve what you’re looking to do, this is just one of many ways you can do it.

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    Ben_Young1
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    • July 29, 2022

    Hey @Michael_W!
    Welcome to the forums!

    Short and simple answer: It is not possible to see all the possible values you can filter by for a single-line text field.

    Presuming that you might be looking for a solution, I have a couple of suggestions for your use case.
    Since it appears that you might be making the transition to Airtable from Excel/Spreadsheets/etc., something super important about working with Airtable is that treating it or comparing it to a spreadsheet will leave you frustrated, disappointed, and no longer willing to explore the platform.

    Here is an example of a really flexible (and powerful) way to work with, view, and manage your data.

    I created a table with 1,000 records with random date values.

    Okay, so what if I want to sort them by their year?
    My first thought is to leverage a formula. The date functions are amazing.
    If you’re not really playing with formulas a ton, then I highly recommend
    the formula field reference (and the playground). It’s incredibly helpful when learning to build formulas.

    If I use the DATETIME_FORMAT function, I can quickly have Airtable tell me the year of each of the date values:

    Okay, but that’s too simple. What if I want to look at more specific date values and sort/group/filter them that way?

    You can tweak your formula to provide easily manageable values that you can quickly work with.

    Using a bit of grouping, I can quickly organize my data into a format that I can easily filter and sort by.

    There are tons of ways that you can achieve what you’re looking to do, this is just one of many ways you can do it.

    ScottWorld
    M
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