Preserve manual sort order after applying automatic sort

[Kevin_Rushton]

It’s cool that you can manually click and drag to reorder records. But what if you want to temporarily apply an automatic sort, and then go back to your manual sorting? As far as I can tell, you would need two separate views to do this–and if you ever accidentally applied sorting to the manually sorted view, you would lose your manual sorting forever.

Using two separate views isn’t ideal for me because I already have a lot of views and for my needs this would effectively double that already large number of views. And the risk of permanently losing my sorting makes it not really seem worth it.

What I propose is some sort of ordenal sorting field… Essentially it would be the same as the numbers that currently appear on the far left in grid view, except that if you applied an automatic sort, those numbers would stay with the same record. So if you had:

1 A
2 C
3 B

and you resorted it alphabetically, you would have:

1 A
3 B
2 C

instead of

1 A
2 B
3 C

Then, if you want to go back to the original order, you just sort by the ordenal field.

Of course if there is already a better way to do this, please help me find it.

[John_Aitchison]

I was actually really surprised to find that this is not the default behavior of Airtable. To the Airtable product owners – you should really implement this feature as OP described. On the backend, a sort id that only changes when rows are manually sorted would do the trick. Without this feature, drag and drop of rows is fairly useless in any use case that involves wanting to sort your data temporarily. E.g. “I have a prioritized list of work, highest priority at the top, but I just want to quickly see my work sorted by expected effort required” (Agile, RICE, etc)

My workaround: I added a number column “Priority” and I have a sort applied on this field.

Any time I want to move a row higher up or down in my priority, instead of dragging and dropping, I change the value of the Priority column. Then no matter what else I do to the table - sort by other columns, group, etc - I can always sort by my Priority column and get rows sorted by my own priority again.

[Richard_Przekop]

As a new user of Airtable I would also expect this to be the default behavior. How do we raise this with the Product team (do they have a feature request system like Jira)?

[Fahad_Almisned]

This is causing me huge problems… I have a fairly large base and add-ons and I do a lot of data altering, I keep losing my sort for no reason all the time.

I used to refresh the page and it would go back to normal but it’s not doing that anymore.

PLEASE fix this Airtable team.