Alt View Options for Grouping by Multiple Tags?

[pangolinzen]

Hi! I'm looking for an alternate way to display records that are grouped by a "multiple select" field. 

As an example, I have records of food items and am grouping by the Food Type field with tags Fruits, Veggies, Carbs, Berries, etc. Some records, such as Cherry will be tagged both "Fruits" and "Berries." 

As it displays now, Cherry will be grouped in its own area of both Fruits and Berries rather than showing up in the individual Fruits group and the Berries group. 

I realize that having Cherry show up in both groups would mean the single record is displayed twice, so perhaps there's an alternate way of grouping records where the group will show all records with a given tag? I'd love to come up with a solution for this, because it gets pretty cumbersome to sift through many annoying "groups" where multiple tags are used. I just want to see ALL the records with that tag, regardless of any other tags those records may have!

[ScottWorld · Accepted solution]

You have a few options for this:

1. You can create a “list” view instead of a “grid” view. List views act differently than all other views by automatically breaking apart multiselect fields into distinct groups.

2. You can convert your multi-select field into a linked record field, and then you can group from the other linked table instead of the current table.

3. You can view your data in pivot tables or other types of charts, which give you the ability to split apart your multiselect options.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld 

[pangolinzen]

Thanks so much for your reply!

Because this database currently uses ~40 tags, I'm hoping to avoid making ~40 different views - if I understand correctly, making a list view for each tag would achieve a similar output as making a filtered grid view.

Your second solution may be the best straightforward work around, though I hate to move away from the convenient multi select field! I wish Airtable had an option to choose to display grouped records only by single multi-select fields.

I'm not as familiar with pivot tables and charts within Airtable, so I'll take a look at those options. If they easily allow for adding new records within the given group, that could be a solid solution as well. 

[pangolinzen]

Oh! No, you are correct! I just played with the List view again and grouping by multi-select does exactly what I want. I'm not sure why I didn't see that before. It's not how I prefer to work with the records (I'd much rather this work in grid view so I can see/edit the other fields easily), but it gets the job done.

I assume that there isn't a fancy script workaround to achieving this in grid view? If there is, it's something I would pay a consultant for until Airtable hopefully makes it a built-in option.

[ScottWorld]

No, you can’t control this with scripting. Glad I could help! If you don’t mind, could you please mark my answer as the solution above? This will help others in the future, because it should rise to the top of the search results.