Issues with Groups not Grouping Identical Content

[Peter_Kassel]

Hello! I have been organizing the content of my company’s information for a few weeks and got to the point where I could set up a customer table from my list. When I choose what information is going to be present, and then group the information, even though the essential groupings are identical, Airtable is breaking the information up. You can see the attached screenshot (with names redacted) for an example.

Customer Relationship and Market Sector are the items that I am grouping by and this is what happens:

Is there some sort of metadata that could be causing this issue?

[ScottWorld]

Welcome to the community, @Peter_Kassel!

It’s because you have extra spaces in some of your fields, but ridiculously, Airtable hides all extra spaces from being shown onscreen. So you either have trailing spaces or leading spaces or multiple spaces between your words.

Welcome to the crazy upside-down world of Airtable where nothing makes sense & everything is half-baked.

To sum up the craziness here: Airtable won’t SHOW YOU your extra spaces, but Airtable will still SORT/GROUP/FILTER/SEARCH/etc. as if your extra spaces are actually there. So you can’t visually tell what’s really going on.

You’ll have to manually double-click into your fields to see where the extra spaces are so you can clean them up, but as soon as you click out of your fields, the spaces will visually disappear again.

And the most important thing you can do is email Airtable’s support team at support@airtable.com to try to get them to fix this behavior… maybe you’ll have better luck than the rest of us have had for the last several years.

[Peter_Kassel]

ScottWorld:

It’s because you have extra spaces in some of your fields, but ridiculously, Airtable hides all extra spaces from being shown onscreen. So you either have trailing spaces or leading spaces or multiple spaces between your words.

Would these spaces be in ancillary fields? Or the two fields that I’m grouping by?

[ScottWorld]

Your grouped fields.

[Peter_Kassel]

That’s where the issue seems to confuse me… There are no extra spaces there. I have them set up as Single Choice drop downs and there are only two available choices. Its REALLY strange…

[ScottWorld]

Maybe export as a CSV file, and open up in a text editor, and see if you can see anything odd.

[kuovonne]

Can you provide a screen shot of the configuration of the {Market Sector} field? Is it possible that you have two different options with the exact same name?

[Peter_Kassel]

I’ll give this a shot soon and see if something shows up, but I’m not seeing anything particularly egregious…

@kuovonne Thanks for your suggestion! As you can see in the following screen shots, there is no doubled up choice for any of these, nor ghost options:

Market Sector (broken in to two screen caps due to sizing)

Customer Relationship:

[Kamille_Parks]

Question: If the field settings you screenshotted directly above are Single/Multi Select Fields, why are they shown as plain text in your first screenshot? Are you actually grouping by Lookup or Rollup fields?

[Peter_Kassel]

Grouping via Rollup, the formula is as follows: