Formula To Have Dynamic Persistent Location Based On View

I’ll chime in to address some things that the others didn’t.

Because Airtable is a database, record order is largely irrelevant (as far as Airtable is concerned) because records have no inherent relationship. Records have no connection to other records. In a specific situation, you may want to sort records in a specific way, but as you’ve seen, Airtable doesn’t keep track of record order when they’re not sorted. You can manually drag records into a specific order all you want, but don’t assume that Airtable is tracking any of that for the long haul. Unfortunately the only way to reliably control record order is to create one or more fields where you specify that order somehow, and then apply a sort based on the field(s) you made.

Yeah, sorting behavior can definitely be a bit strange in Airtable. There are definitely some inconsistencies and/or some bugs with it. (Although I have not experienced your bug of one view changing the sort order of another view.)

In general, if you sort records and choose the “Keep sorted” option, when you unsort your records, your records snap back to their original creation order (you can visually see this by adding a “Creation Date” field). And if you sort your records but DON’T choose the “Keep sorted” option, then they stay in their current order when you unsort your records.

But here’s a little-known trick that many people don’t know, which may help you with your auto-numbering issue. People probably don’t know about this because it doesn’t work 100% of the time. It only works under certain circumstances, which I think is a bug in Airtable.

Under certain circumstances, when you create a brand new Autonumber field, Airtable will (sometimes, when it’s working) automatically number all of your records based on their current order.

So what you can do is this:

1. Sort your records and/or drag your records into the order that you’d like for them to be in. You can drag records around by grabbing the record’s handle on the far left of every row. Note that you can only drag records if the choice to “keep sorted” isn’t selected.

2. Once you get all of your records in the exact order that you want them in, create a brand new autonumber field. Airtable will (sometimes, when it’s working) automatically number all of your records in their current order, which gives you a “snapshot in time” of your current sort order.

3. Then you can go back to that “snapshot in time” whenever you want, by sorting on that autonumber field.

4. BONUS: You can create several of these autonumber fields, if you’d like! So, since you can have many different autonumber fields, you can have “many different snapshots in time”… and you can even name those fields however you’d like.

So when does this trick seem to work? I can’t tell. It has something to do with how recently you sorted your records using that “sort” button, and whether or not you had the “Keep Sorted” toggle turned on or off at the time. It’s rather inconsistent, and I can’t figure out rhyme or reason to when this trick works and when this trick doesn’t work.

Outside of attempting to use this trick, you could also try creating a JavaScript script using the new scripting block that can manually apply numbers to a number field for you by looping through the records from top to bottom. I don’t know JavaScript, so someone else would have to help you with that. That might be your most consistent solution.

And of course, you could always fall back on just manually typing in numbers into a number field to manually order your records. You could use decimal points to squeeze records in between other records, so you don’t need to keep renumbering every record in your entire table.

Awesome! Yeah that works! A bit of a manual task but simple enough.
I do my work, sort manually, add the auto number and it holds them in that position. When I go and do more work, rearrange, I can essentially reset that sort by changing it back and forth and it renumbers things. Just what I needed!