BULK EDIT CHECKBOX FIELD IN RECORDS THAT WOULD REMOVE THEM FROM A VIEW

[William_McDonal]

Our team uses airtable to track orders and get through a large list of records each day. I have a view setup that removes a record when a box is checked (completed) so we only see what's left to work on. Our records are grouped by client and some clients have multiple records. Due to the filter, as you click the checkbox on 1 record it disappears from the list which only allows you to click one at a time. Any solution you could think of to select all the records in one grouping and bulk edit them to "checked"?

[Ron_Daniel]

William, this is a common thing I face in Airtable, when things are grouped and filtered. I've tried a ton of workarounds, and haven't found one yet.

Hopefully my latest attempt might inspire you to another solution? I created a "Last Modified Time" field, included time, and set it to monitor only the checkbox field. I was going to filter out anything that was checked more than 20 seconds ago. However, the filter only works with weeks, months, or years. So then I figured I could do the calculation with a field instead.

The formula DATETIME_DIFF(NOW(), {Last Change}, "seconds") should theoretically show me how many seconds ago the checkbox was checked. Then I could filter on Status=Checked and Seconds>20. Except my testing of the "NOW" function showed that it doesn't update in realtime. It'll count the seconds, but even refreshing my browser window will show it unchanged for several minutes.
Seems like Airtable should have named it NOW-ISH lol

[ScottWorld]

@William_McDonal 

Yes, this is such a pain!

You could create a "secondary" checkbox field that you can select in bulk, and then have an automation that checks the "real" checkbox field after you bulk select the secondary checkbox field.

You wouldn't even need to show the "real" checkbox field onscreen... you can just show the "secondary" checkbox field.

.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

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Hmm, if your "Clients" exist as a linked field to another table, you could try using a List view maybe? 

Link to base

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If the Clients field isn't a linked field to another table this gets trickier though.  I think I'd try setting up an automation that would trigger when a single one of the checkboxes was ticked, and its action would be to tick the checkboxes for all of the Orders for that Client that aren't ticked

[Alexey_Gusev]

It's quite simple. Select whole field and paste '1'. When grouped, only one group selected, which at the top (and expanded). If you have nowhere to take '1' in table, type it in search (any search, Windows, Airtable, hyperlink row at the top, select and cut). Then click at field name. Notice number of cells selected at the bottom of primary field, (just for additional control that you are going to check correct amount of records, if you remember approximate number of records in group). Press ctrl+V.
when used to this method, it's not longer than 2-3 seconds to do.

[Ron_Daniel]

@Alexey_Gusev  that is awesome! I would never have thought to try it, but it works!