Help

This Product Ideas board is currently undergoing updates, but please continue to submit your ideas.

Natural Sort (ignore leading articles)

cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 
Travis_Carden
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

I would like the ability to perform a “natural sort” that ignores leading articles (a, an, the). (I would like grouping to use the same logic.) The use case is that I have a database of books, and I would like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, for example, to appear in the A’s rather than the T’s. In Google Sheets I achieve this by creating a dedicated sort column with a function: REGEXREPLACE($B2, "^(A|An|The) ", "").

3 Comments
Michael_Sherwoo
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

I second this! It could easily be implemented as a toggle switch in the sort menu.

Santiago_Ruiz
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Do y’all know if there’s an answer yet for this?

Travis_Carden
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

There’s been no official answer to this topic (obviously), and no new feature yet that I know of. In the meantime, I’ve been sorting by a hidden formula field. Here’s an example formula from a book database including book series and title:

SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE({Series} & {Title}, "A ", ""), "An ", ""), "The ", ""), '"', "")

As you can see, it concatenates the series name and title and just deletes "A ", "An ", and "The " wherever it finds them.