Yes, querying the view rather than the table preserved the order of the items that were manually sorted using drag-and-drop in the UI. Thank you, @Kasra!

There is another reason it's desirable to change the field type: to reset an auto numbered column.If you create an auto numbered column, then manually reorder records and want the auto numbering to start from 1 and go to N again, the only way to do t...

I am new to Airtable and shocked to find this isn't possible!I want to keep our priorities in Airtable. They are dragged-and-dropped to be in a certain order. Then if we ever apply a sort to a column, then remove the sort, the original manual sorting...