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.
Never heard of Ableton Live (just read about it for first time) but yeah, that’s exactly what I think Airtable needs. Frankly, I think it would be a Killer Feature improvement and the programmers at Airtable should stay up all night tonight and tomorrow night and knock this out tout de suite.
Yah, and working on my base this morning, I think I struck the most common user case for needing the ability to group fields - writing formulas.
Below screenshot shows 3 lookups that are then concatenated within a formula field. I have no real use for the lookup fields other than to provide their returns for the formula - it would be great to tie/nest/collapse these lookup fields within the formula field itself.
This feature is really becoming a must have. I create VERY complex tables for my clients, some of them with 100+ columns. Making them belong to a GROUP of columns is essential so you don’t get lost.
Airtable’s rising challenger - Timetonic - has this feature built in so it also makes displaying records in “card” mode really handy because you can then simply decide in which order the groups appear, which group not to display. So handy. See attached, the group name is actually mentioned on the left so you can jump from section to section easily (and yeah Airtable, it’s time you did something about the record view).
PLEASE Airtable do something about this !! Allow column grouping (and naming such groups) so we can move / display / hide entire groups of columns.
I do have views on my setup, lots of them. But sometimes I want to reach one column that is shown in another view. It take me completely of my mental flow to go to another view, find the record, change the data point and go back all the way. At the very least we could have a button that says "Open record in X view" that would be so useful to jump around between views
