Question about Sort Sequence in a Grid View

[Roger_France]

I feel like I must be missing something very simple, but I have a grid view with an Email Address column, and it is sorted by that column and only that column. For the most part it looks fine, but Email Address ‘psmith82…’ is sorting ahead of ‘psmith11…’. Anyone else noticed anything like this, or have any suggestions? Thanks!

[ScottWorld]

Double-click inside the email field and see if you have any leading spaces before any of the email addresses.

One of the most annoying “features” of Airtable is that it will never show you multiple spaces or leading spaces or trailing spaces when you’re viewing your records, because the Airtable engineers decided that it was a “great idea” to trim spaces.

[Roger_France]

Thanks for the quick reply. Yes, I did that…and if there were, they would have sorted way ahead of the other addresses in the list. I also confirmed that the ‘1’ (one) is not an ‘l’ (lower-case el). Still scratching my head…but glad this community is here. :winking_face: Thanks again.

[kuovonne · Accepted solution]

Airtable has a unique method of sorting strings with numbers. Instead of doing a straight character-by-character sort, Airtable tries to turn digits into numbers and sort by number.

You don’t show the entire values of our email addresses, but I’m guessing that the psmith82… email address has fewer digits than your psmith11… email address.

Here is a similar example of this unique sort situation.

[Roger_France]

Wow - Amazing! And ridiculously illogical! :crazy_face: Yes, your guess is correct. The first in sort sequence is psmith82nnn@xxx.x, and the next is psmith11nnnn@xxx.x - five digits in the first, six digits in the second, so yes 82 thousand is less than 110 thousand. Bug or feature? I know what my vote is, since this is obviously an alphanumeric element. Throws a minor wrench into my effort at doing a match/merge with some Excel data. Anyway thanks for the info, and thanks to you I’ll close this as answered. :upside_down_face:

[ScottWorld]

Wow. Crazy. Thanks for pointing out this illogical behavior, @kuovonne! Every day is an unpredictable roller coaster ride with Airtable. At least there’s never a boring day around here! :crazy_face: