Sort these groups by another field?

[ScottWorld]

I don’t know if this is possible in Airtable, but I thought that I would ask anyways.

In the screenshot below, you can see that we have a travel itinerary which is grouped by country name.

The groups are sorted alphabetically by country name.

However, we would actually like the groups to be sorted by a completely different field altogether. We would actually like the groups to be sorted by the “earliest start date” within each group.

In other words, we want each group to appear in chronological date order (like an actual chronological travel itinerary), as opposed to alphabetical order of the country names.

Is there any way to accomplish this in Airtable?

[Justin_Barrett]

My gut response is to suggest that you nix the grouping. If it’s getting in the way of your date sorting, then don’t use it. It looks like the records will pretty much end up grouped by country anyway after you sort chronologically (and after you add dates to those records without them). If those undated records need to remain undated, then my next suggestion is to reorder the country names in the {Country} single select field to force the order you need for everything to flow chronologically.

[Steven_Teters]

Airtable

Untitled Base - Airtable

Explore the "Untitled Base" base on Airtable.

[ScottWorld]

Thanks, @Justin_Barrett. Oops, I uploaded the incorrect screenshot. Every record was supposed to have dates. There will be no undated records in this table. Every record will have dates. But thanks, I figured that Airtable had no way to do this “automatically”… at least while sticking to a single table.

Thanks, @Steven_Teters. I didn’t mention this above, but I already knew that this could be accomplished with multiple tables, but the problem with multiple tables is that I can’t get all the countries AND all the cities to appear on one unified calendar view, since unfortunately, Airtable’s calendar view can only pull from ONE DISTINCT TABLE at this time.

So there’s no “native/automatic” way to do what I want to do in Airtable, but as @Justin_Barrett mentioned above, I can just get rid of the grouping altogether because every country will be in the proper order anyways once I add dates.

But I think the grouping looks very cool, though — and I love the ability to expand and collapse groups — so for now, I’ll just do the manual workaround of manually reordering the country names in the single-select pop-up list. In other words, force the group ordering into the order that I’d like.

Thanks, you guys! :slightly_smiling_face:

EDIT: Oh, another reason I love groups is because it saves time on data entry. When you add a new record into that group, Airtable automatically types in the proper value for the field which is being grouped by.

[Michael_Kruse]

You could add a formula field and then group by THAT field to force the grouping order that you want:

Start Date & " - " & Country

I had a similar situation that led me to this thread - I want to group some volunteers by event name, but sort the list of groups by the event date. I just created a formula to put the date first in the the grouping field.