Help

Using GUI's manual sort order

862 1
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Anne_Smith
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I added a group by to a view and saw that the order of the field being grouped by was automatically sorted alphabetically. I’d like to be able to sort by the natural order (gui order of record in its own table view) of the field rather than alphabetically.

The context is that I’m using Airtable to organize a novel. I’d like to be able to arrange my various views of scenes plots, plot points, scenes etc in a specific order - and to be able to change that order on the fly via drag and drop and then sort by that order in various views. I thought perhaps I could add a field based on that order via some formula but there’s no way to access that order through a formula. From what I can see I can’t even access it via api (though perhaps that’s just as well as the main goal here is to finish a novel not start a web dev project :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: )

Anyway I thought I’d check to see if anyone could think of some trick that would get me some control of this manual sort order. Possibly I’m not designing my base in the best way for Airtable. I’m a developer and I’m used to designing a nice normalized RDBMS but maybe that’s not the best way to take advantage of Airtable…

Thanks!

1 Reply 1
Anne_Smith
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Okay, I found a fairly usable solution. I had settled on viewing from a table that had all the linked in fields I needed to see. BUT then I realized that I could add a field that I needed exposed in my view via lookup. This way I can view my records from the table I originally tried to group by - in their natural gui sort order.