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Drag & Drop prioritization based on row number

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Kuba_Granat
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Hi everyone,
I’m new here but already in love with Airtable. I need your help to solve my problem.
Here is the case. I’m Product Manager and I’m responsible for prioritization. I want to involve everyone in the company to this process, by giving them a possibility to set their priorities within their department.

To achieve that, I’d like to share with them their own table → which will be a sync table from my master table. This table includes every solution we’ve mapped so far.

Here is an example:

Zrzut ekranu 2021-11-16 o 11.45.56

They can’t modify anything here, because it’s a sync table, but I would like them to set priorities. Nothing from among ratings (stars) or votes (number of votes) doesn’t work, because this way of prioritization results in the end that “everything is very urgent” or several of features are rated with same number of stars.

So I want them, to prioritize this table by dragging and dropping items on the list, from most important ones (at the top) to the less important ones (at the bottom). This way of prioritization means that nothing can be equally urgent. And this is obviously possible to achieve and I know how to do this in Airtable.

Zrzut ekranu 2021-11-16 o 11.52.57

And now, the case is that I’d like to get the position of an item on the list, which basically is its row number.

Zrzut ekranu 2021-11-16 o 11.56.12

Then I’d like to get this number to my master table, and repeat same thing with table assigned to each department.

Zrzut ekranu 2021-11-16 o 12.29.02

So I can have all their priorities at one place and can take decisions having a helicopter view. Of course these aren’t only factors I’ll be taking into the consideration while prioritizing, but having clear view of what our departments need will be certainly helpful.

Could anyone please give me an advice how to approach this issue?

have a wonderful day everyone,
Jakub

5 Replies 5
Kuba_Granat
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

Hi, can no one really help me? :pleading_face:

Up. Guys, if it’s not possible in Airtable, how would you approach this topic?

There is no built-in way in Airtable to re-number rows when you shuffle around the order of records. You would have to manually type in the numbers that you want, or you could write your own JavaScript to help you do it. I believe that JavaScript can see the order of the records on a view.

Thanks for your reply @ScottWorld ! I was afraid hearing that… But I wonder why there isn’t such a feature in Airtable. It seems really easy to implement and I can see plenty use-cases, especially in terms of prioritization which is so important in many cases.

So, how people use Airtable for prioritization? Do they use features such as ‘stars’ or a predefined field with selection of priority levels? This always leads to same problem, that we do decisions having couple of tasks which are rated exactly the same…

Yes, either of those ideas could work, but there will likely be duplicates as you said.

You could also use a number field that displays decimal points, so you could have more fine-tune precision over the prioritization of your tasks. In other words, you could prioritize your tasks with numbers like this: 1.00, 1.01, 1.10, 1.11, 1.20, 1.21, 1.25, 1.30, 1.37, 1.40, 1.50, 1.60, etc.

Although, once again, if people are manually typing in their own values, you would need to figure out how to prevent duplicates.

There are literally hundreds (probably thousands) of features that have never made it into Airtable that many of us would love to see. You could email them at support@airtable.com to request this feature, but I have never yet seen them implement any feature requests from their users — and many of these feature requests are even more critical than the one you are talking about. Airtable does not have a very good culture of “delighting their customers”.

If this particular feature is really important to you, you would either need to custom-create this feature on your own by writing your own Javascript scripts (or hiring someone to write those scripts for you), or you would need to use another platform that offers this ability.

I believe that Asana offers this capability. And if you still wanted to use Airtable in addition to using another platform like Asana, you could always sync your data between the two platforms.

I have a few of my clients syncing their data between Asana & Airtable using my favorite automation tool Integromat: