At our company, we have tables that can have up to 30-40 columns in them, especially on the “summary” or “master” tables, where data is assembled from other tables. This can get very confusing.
What If we could group similar columns together in a similar way we group rows? Color-coded, collapsible, and individually shareable. It could be quite powerful.
Highly desirable Feature! Same problem as others have noted before. Have ~100 fields. Without some grouping to aggregate them they can get out of hand and difficult to understand. When collaborators dont have the patience to sift through 100s of fields to enter their data, they can ironically create more duplicate fields for the same purpose.
+1 to this!!! We have many 100+ column tables and we’re needing to enforce naming conventions and tedious View configuration copy-pasting to keep things reasonably organized
I’m adding my +1 to this as well. There’s a huge need for this in my context, and multiple views simply does not fill the need. If Google Sheets can make something like this available then AirTable should have no problem. Make it happen!
Agreed! I don’t see any response here from Airtable admins. Is this something we could get insight on? Are you considering adding this feature? Can we get a notification on this thread as to whether you’re working on it or not?
This is exactly what I pictured as well. And just like you mentioned its really hard to move fields having to drag individual fields one at a time.
Maybe another QoL update would be to let you select and move multiple fields at once or groups at once. And/Or have a way to show the field order with numbers so you can just type in a number.
I see this was originally posted almost 4 years ago. I just logged in to make this same suggestion. It would be extremely useful if we could
group columns,
name the groups, and
collapse groups
I imagine it work kind of the way that tab groups work in Microsoft Edge:
In that screenshot, I’ve got two tabs (one for IMDB and one for Amazon Prime Video) open, grouped, and the group is named “entertainment”. I can click the green “entertainment” button to hide that group. Not a big deal with only 2 tabs but becomes much more useful when there are five or ten tabs in a group and more useful still when there are many groups. Apply the concept to grid views in Airtable.
I see someone responded (long ago) to the OP by asking, Why not just create more views? That would work if we could somehow link a group of views to the same filter, but we can’t. Every view can be and inevitably will be filtered differently.
Let me illustrate. I’m working on a project for a school. They Students table is moderately “wide”, that is, it has maybe 40–50 fields or (in grid view) about 40–50 columns. The columns have pretty clear groupings:
Personal info (FirstName, MiddleName, LastName, Sex, DOB, SSN, etc)
Parental info (Parent names, addresses, emails, phones, etc)
Enrollment info (DateFirstInquiry, DateApplicationMailed, DateApplicationReceived, DateAccepted, RegistrationFeePaid, RegistrationFeeAmountPaid, etc)
ClassAssignments
EmergencyInfo
And so on. Now say my user (a staff member at the school) wants to get info about a student, or to enter a new student. If I create five different views corresponding to the groups I just described, and if my user wants to review all the info for a student and possibly edit fields that she notices need editing, she has to find the same student record over and over as she switches views — either by filtering each view (if there aren’t many users using the base) or by scrolling through list of 200 currently-enrolled students over and over again to find the record for Susie Schwartz, or by going the same find over and over.
The ability to group, name, and collapse groups of columns in grid view has exactly the same benefits that being able to collapse sections of fields on a form has: It makes everything much more efficient.
And it would have the side benefit of obviating the need to create so darned many views, which is one of the worst aspects of Airtable’s UX.
