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Sorting Multiple Select Groups

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I’m using Airtable to create a content management system for my company’s blog. Many blogs entries have multiple topics so I’m using the multiple select function to organize that. Problem is, when I go to group by categories it doesn’t sort by each option, rather by the grouping of options.

For example:
Blog A can fall under the category of “Topic A” and “Topic B”. When I sort by group I’d like it to sort into all things that fall into “Topic A” in one section, and all things that sort into “Topic B” in another. But when I sort it categorizes it as “Topic A & Topic B”.

Is there are way to fix this sorting option?

    2 replies

    Justin_Barrett
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    Welcome to the community, Delaine! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Unfortunately behavior this isn’t something that can be “fixed,” mainly because it’s not actually broken. This happens because an Airtable record can only exist in one place, like in a single group. When the field used for grouping is a multi-select field with multiple items chosen, Airtable doesn’t clone the record and show it in multiple places (i.e. in a separate group for each item). It treats the link combo as a single item requiring its own group, as you saw, and that’s where the record is shown.

    Depending on how many topics you have, you might consider making a view for each topic, with a filter used to only show a single topic per view. You wouldn’t be able to see all posts at once this way, but it would definitely collect all posts tied to a single topic in one place.

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    Justin_Barrett wrote:

    Welcome to the community, Delaine! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Unfortunately behavior this isn’t something that can be “fixed,” mainly because it’s not actually broken. This happens because an Airtable record can only exist in one place, like in a single group. When the field used for grouping is a multi-select field with multiple items chosen, Airtable doesn’t clone the record and show it in multiple places (i.e. in a separate group for each item). It treats the link combo as a single item requiring its own group, as you saw, and that’s where the record is shown.

    Depending on how many topics you have, you might consider making a view for each topic, with a filter used to only show a single topic per view. You wouldn’t be able to see all posts at once this way, but it would definitely collect all posts tied to a single topic in one place.


    This would be an amazingly helpful feature…I hope this can be address in a future release. By looking through the community forums, it seems to be a commonly requested capability

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