Changing sort order of grouped items by another field

[Michael_Morris2]

I have a view which is grouped by project name in order to show total time spent per project. My options for sorting the groups are alphabetical. I would prefer to sort this group by a date field so that it shows the most recent project at the top of the screen. Is this possible? I was able to create a formula “Date” & “Project” field which was successful, but it’s not a particularly clean way to go about it. Thanks!

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

Sadly, this capability is not built into Airtable. There is no quick/easy/simple way to do this in Airtable. This is actually one of my top feature requests for Airtable!!

I would love to know if anybody can come up with (a lengthy & complicated) workaround for your solution, though — I’m sure there are some complex workarounds for it.

[andywingrave]

I’m not sure I understand this - Would you mind sending a screenshot?

[Michael_Morris2]

Thank you Scott, I figured there was no easy answer or I would have found it. To clarify for Saastronomical and others, I’m attaching two screenshots. This is what I started with:

But I can only order these groups alphabetically however I’d rather they are grouped by Date Started so that my most recent project is at the top of the list. A workaround I found is to create a formula field

DATETIME_FORMAT({Date started},‘L’)& " - " & {Project}

Which I can now group by, creating this:

This achieves my grouping/sorting goals but it does seem like an unnecessary step and I don’t like the date displayed on my titles. Oh well, it works at least.

[ScottWorld]

But you’re not really explaining your database system or your table structure. Where does this date field live? How are projects related to time logs? Are you ideally trying to group/sort from projects or time logs? We can’t see any of this information because you’ve collapsed the groups.

[Michael_Morris2]

Scott, the short response is that my question has been answered already by your first post (thank you) and I’ve found a work around that works for me.

But to try to satisfy your questions, the “Project Name” and “Date Started” fields live in the Projects table. “Project Name” is linked in the Time Log table and is just called “Project”. “Date Started” is a Lookup field in the Time Log table, referenced from the Projects table.

I’m trying to get the results as shown in my second image in my previous post: Group all of my time log entries by Project and sort those projects by Date Started. I just thought there might be an easier way and not have to display the date field in the groupings to do it. How the individual time log entries within to the groups are sorted is irrelevant to me.

Anyway, I consider this question to be answered unless somebody has a better solution. I’m happy to answer more questions about my Base if you’re interested though.

[ScottWorld]

Ah okay, thanks so much for explaining further! As far as I know, what you did is the very best solution that we can do now in Airtable. (Unless, like you said, somebody has a better solution.)

This is an issue that has come up for me on MANY different occasions in the past, and I consider it to be one of the biggest missing features in Airtable.

I posted a feature request for this here: When grouping records, be able to sort by summary fields

I’m not even sure if Airtable employees visit this community or read any of our product suggestions, but if you’d like to add your comments to that post, maybe it could help get this added into a future Airtable update.

[kuovonne]

ScottWorld:

I’m not even sure if Airtable employees visit this community or read any of our product suggestions

The Community Guidelines states that Airtable Employees do visit this community:

While Airtable employees post on the forums relatively frequently (these users have “Airtable” after their username and a special badge that says “Airtable Employee” on their user profiles), they will not respond to every post, and you should not expect that your post will necessarily receive a response from an Airtable employee.

[ScottWorld]

Thank you! Good to know.