Changing/moving the primary column

User Talk
1

It is pretty great how it is possible to rearrange columns in SeaTable without much effort.

But now I ran into an issue with a pretty large table in which a date column is the first, or “primary”, column. It would be much preferrable for purposes of references to use a text column for the primary column, but it is impossible to move this column into the primary position via drag/drop, nor is it possible to create a new column to the left of the primary column.

I am missing something obvious here?

For a little background, the table was created via an Excel file import that just happened to have a date column on the leftmost side. It wouldn’t be possible to change the source Excel file and re-import because considerable work has already been done on the data in SeaTable.

2

Hi, the first column is used to identify the row, so it cannot be replaced by other columns in the table. You can only change the type of the first column.

In this case, I would recommend you to duplicate this current table (also copy the records),
image

so that the table you are working on is safe.

Now, in the new table, change the type of the first column into ‘text’ and make further changes. In case you still need the date column somewhere, you can create a new date column and copy the values from the original table to this column.

1 Like
3

Perfect, this worked! Thank you :slightly_smiling_face: