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Re: Header "Rows" as stationary rows

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Wayne_Merlino
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

Hello,

I am switching over from Smartsheet to Airtable currently and am curious if anyone has an idea of how to create what I am calling “Header Rows” per the attached image. We are looking to categorize work based on what is happening today and still see the other rows that have work for the next few days. We also split our workflow into multiple teams and ultimately want to see it this way. To complicate things, we track work statuses and typically split them into each team on the sheet - the idea being we can schedule each team independently of each other. The attached image, where i have the kinds of header rows I am talking about (see “MONITORING VISITS”, “RED TEAM TODAY”, “GREEN TEAM TODAY”, “WHITE TEAM TODAY”, AND “ZERO / SPECIALS - UPCOMING” rows) is what I a ultimately looking to do. Any help would be appreciated. image

5 Replies 5

Rows in Airtable are records, and there’s no way to have certain records behave differently from other records.

I suggest that you look into groups. Using a formula or two, you could probably create group headers that would work for your needs.

Thanks for the feedback. I am currently using groups to put like phases together. I think what I am ultimately looking to do may not be possible - which in essence the following:

  1. Control the order the phases (or groups) show up from top to bottom on the screen
  2. Be able to see "todays’ items grouped together in the order that I want, as well as whatever is in backlog (i.e. not today) and have them grouped together by phase and in date order. Sort of like: “Here is what we have today for each phase of work, and below is what is coming up - also grouped by phase”.

I think because we have been doing it so long as my screen shot shows it is hard to conceptualize a different way to do this in AT’s environment.

Maybe I should get an AT consultant as I am sure that in my attempts I am truly making it more complex than needed…

If you have a budget for your project and you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with your Airtable system, please feel free to contact me through my website at ScottWorld.com.

Hi @Wayne_Merlino!
As @Justin_Barrett suggested, what you are after is to group (3) a view, possibly filter (4) it and to sort (5). All these are possible in Airtable. I would personally add a formula field, as suggested, into the mix.

It’s worth knowing that grouping, filtering and sorting only affects the view you apply it to and not all by default.

filter_group_sort

In the example image I have three important fields for this to work; a date field (already exists), a formula field and a single select field. Note: that this is just one way of doing it!

  1. Start by creating a single select field. I call it {Team}.
    In a single select field you can chose in what order you want the select options to be placed. If you then group by that field the records will be placed in that order. Name your teams here in preferred order.
    Note: The drawback of having teams assigned this way is that you sacrifice the most simple way of having {Tasks} linked to a {Teams} table. It can still be done though.

  2. Create a new formula field to calculate if {Date} is before TODAY(), on or after TODAY(). This is just an example formula you can use, but you can customize endlessly to fit your needs. The example formula has four outputs.

  • Not date selected
  • Previous
  • Today
  • Upcoming

IF({Date}=BLANK(),"Not date selected",IF(DATETIME_DIFF({Date},TODAY(),'days')<0,"Previous",IF(TODAY()={Date},"Today",IF(DATETIME_DIFF({Date},TODAY(),'days')>=1,"Upcoming"))))

  1. Group records by {Team} (3) . You can further group them by a second, or :n-th, criteria. In the example image they are grouped by {Formula field} as second criteria.

grouped

  1. To filter out all previous records, records with {Date} before TODAY(), I have filtered (4) ’Where {Formula field} is not “previous”. (Remove the " from previous).

filtered

  1. Lastly I have sorted (5) the records by {Date} to get the “Upcoming” records to sort in order of date.

sort

Lastly / Sidenote:
If you have a budget to use a consultant to figure out the best solution for your base then I would recommend you do so. Airtable gives so many opportunities and having someone that knows what they’re doing to guide the way through all possibilities when you’re just starting out is (almost) priceless.

I have found that you in the end pay in one of two ways anyway; by transaction, be it money or favour; or by time - to learn something new, to re-build past misstakes etc.

That feedback was awesome - thanks for taking the time to do that! It does show me that my inexperience in relational databases makes seeing the path of least resistance hard to see!

On a related note: The more I get into views the more I start to see how combing grouping, filtering, and ultimately views I can probably get what I need albeit in a different way than I have been used to seeing.

Thanks again for the great feedback.