Hi everyone…we have been using Seatable for some time now and found that our most common repetitive feature need is the ability to sort columns in each view or form we create differently from the main table. This would help us prioritize the most important information in each view most effectively.
I’m just posting it here because it appears the ideas page doesn’t get a lot of traffic or votes, so I’m hoping this helps remind everyone to go and vote on the things they need most. The Seatable team will hopefully appreciate all of us letting them know what we need most and making it clear with a good volume of votes.
I hope this message encourages us all to vote and submit more of your ideas that we and the seatable team may need to hear to make our own use of Seatable better!
I agree that it is currently not possible to use a custom sorted list, for example a view, in forms. You can only use the main table as selectible source. I’d like to see this feature somewhere in the future, too.
But if you create a linked column, what I think you mean if you say “view”, that’s not true. You can exactly chose a specific view from a table which can be sorted the way you need it.
Ahhh…I believe I worded my description in an unclear way. What I mean is not sorting columns and their data ascending and descending, but putting the columns themselves in a different display order.
Example:
Currently in Seatable, If I have a table with the following columns (in this order):
First Name, Last Name, Street, City, State, Zip, Phone, Email, Favorite Food
I CANNOT have a view with the columns in this order:
First Name, Last Name, Email, Phone,Favorite Food,City
Notice that in addition to hiding some columns from the view, the columns themselves are in a different order. The same applies for forms and the order they display their fields (columns). Currently, if we change the order of the columns in the view it actually modifies the table and all other views as well.
Ah okay, now I see what you mean. Yes, that would be an awesome feature to have.
I’m also always facing the thing that the column widths do not save for each view seperately. I change the width in one view and the columns in the other view together are too big to have a quick overview, you know?
Yes, this happens the most for me when I have a view with a group by because I have to expand the first column wide enough to actually see the group by name, which then makes it huge on all our other views.
These are hopefully small requests for the Seatable team that add up to big gains for the future of the product and I wish them very well.
Thanks for the input. We have heard similar requests from other SeaTable users before - also in this forum.
We have also got feedback from other users that switched to SeaTable from solutions which support custom column sequences in views that this caused massive confusion. In other words, custom column sequences seem like a great feature in theory, but it’s far from that in practice.
We’ll probably not go ahead and implement custom column sequences. (I personally am not a fan.)
But, before the tears start rolling, I do not think that this is a big loss. Early in 2023, we’ll release our universal app which will allow to design custom user interfaces for different user groups. In these interfaces different tables/views with different column sequences can be integrated. (This is going to be great!!)
I agree that I don’t necessarily love using the grid entry interface as the only interface which is what really causes this need. Ordering fields / columns appropriately from a user interface standpoint is vital, but in a database it is normally not a concern for engineering because we have SQL.
We will be patient for the new interfaces capability and hope it bridges that gap for us. In other tools, the interfaces have very much been disconnected, single record view only or edit only tools, which has made them unusable, but if it is easy to navigate records, view and edit them (the traditional CRUD…create, read, update, delete) then we would be excited about that for sure.
I hope in all the discussion you know we appreciate your hard work on the Seatable product.
