Filter by "starts with" "ends with"

[Oli_Steadman]

For these table features:

• FILTER BY
• COLOR BY

… we currently have the following options, but they do not cater for tables where many records with very similar substrings can be difficult to separate from each other:

• contains
• does not contain
• is
• is not
• is empty
• is not empty
• is any of
• is none of

… so it’d be helpful to have the following additional ways to filter:

• “starts with”
• “ends with”

… for example if I have 1000s of records named by format:

• YYYYMMDD-hh:mm:ss-[0-9][A-Za-z0-9 -]

… I would be able to separate records of a particular year from each other by filtering/coloring on

• name starts with ‘2022’

[kuovonne]

You could do this by using a formula field that puts very unique strings before and after the actual value. Then filter on the formula field using contains.

my original value

The formula field would be something like this:
"^" & {original field} & "$"

The formula field would then show

^my original value$

Then you could set the filter to something like

contains ^My

or

contains value$

If your values might contain ^ or $ in them, just repeat them a few more times, or use a different symbol until you know they are unique.

[SG_SoCal]

Thank you so much for this tip!! I was surprised to find that AirTable doesn’t allow for wildcards in formulas or “starts with” in filtering views, but this workaround is perfect! :star_struck:

[kc]

While the workaround is good, I personally need this as a filter choice for so many views and in the Interface, so adding it is a great idea.

[MSP]

Agree, could use this filter choice as want to avoid adding multiple formula columns as a workaround. As another workaround tried nesting groups to do a filter of "contains" for column and "not" to eliminate others based on different values. However, there is a limit on the number of nesting groups so would not cover all my needs.