This is a real problem for us too! To make our tables useful to people who don’t use Airtable everyday, it needs to behave as people expect. I believe that most people expect lists to be automatically sorted. When they aren’t, it causes people to think that records are missing and creates a dark sense of distrust and dissatisfaction with your product. I hope that Airtable will focus on fundamental issues like sorting and permissions rather than work arounds like locked views and new features like blocks. I like new features but we’ve been waiting years for what many people think should be basic functionality.
I’ve been experimenting with creating a view that has my records grouped by a cell that has a date/time value in descending value.
So far it seems good for those that like viewing data in the “grid view”; of course I’d like to apply this to the “kanban” and “calendar” views. For now it’s an alright alternative to manually updating the filter. Definitely excited what the team has in development!
Can confirm, adding new records regardless of the view will auto-sort. However, it only “sorts” if you are in a grid view that is grouped by the field you want. I wouldn’t say it’s the easiest view to work out of, but could be in handy for any kind of reports/blocks.
Apparently Groups will auto-sort themselves. When @Chris_Mondeau makes a new record, and the DateTime value he is grouping on populates, the record will hover into that orange-highlighted “I’m not where I’m supposed to be” mode until he clicks off it. But once he clicks off it, that new record puts itself into a new “Group” that is properly inserted into the right place amid the other groups in the view.
Not an easy way to work, though, like he said, because each record is going to be in its own group. This means each record is going to require about 5x the space on the screen that a record in ungrouped grid view will.
Hi folks. We’re very excited to announce that we’re beta testing automatic view sorting! If you’re interested in testing out this feature—and giving us your feedback—please sign up using this form.
If you do get access to the beta, please follow the instructions included in the beta email for submitting feedback, rather than writing it in this topic or elsewhere in the forum. Thanks!
Automatic Sorting in Views is a MUST Have feature!!
If the most current records do not show up on top where they belong the users think the program is not working and lose confidence in it.
Great news! Today we officially launched automatic sorting views for all users, both on free and paid plans. To start automatically sorting your records, select the “keep sorted” toggle when configuring the sort. For any existing sorts, you’ll need to activate the “keep sorted” toggle to enable automatic sorting but going forward, all new sorts will be automatic by default.
To learn more about sorting, check out our guide to sorting and record order or feel free to reach out to our team if you have additional questions.
