Apologies if this has been asked/answered elsewhere, I wasn’t able to find it if it was. Am I missing something really obvious or am I correct that it’s not possible for users (other than those with doc maker access) to sort tables? My team regularly exports or copy/pastes data from docs into Excel because they find it easier to perform certain tasks if they can sort things the way the want (like you can in Excel). This seems like an obvious/basic feature to be missing so please let me know if I’m just being a dumdum.
Yeah, as @Stefan_Stoyanov says, viewers and editors don’t have access and that’s who I meant (apologies for the lack of clarity there).
I’m genuinely shocked that sorting for viewers and editors isn’t a thing. I’m far from being a developer but that seems like like day 1 functionality for tables.
is the data structure the same or only a few types of data sets/tables ?
you could create a main table for each table (which they will have to clear all the rows and copy and paste onto it (or use csv upload function) and a button that sorts. Then they can press the button to sort the table.
It takes a little work, but you can create controls for this scenario. Here’s a resource for choosing the column and sort direction.
And here’s a way over-the-top strategy to get pagination for a table that has all the controls you could want, including jumping to a specific “page” of the table.
Hey! Thanks for this. Unfortnately the main table I’d want this to be available for is a bit of a beast with a lot of formulas and moving parts and workflow implications that make this a bit of a non-starter.
Side note on the CSV export functionality, I recently learned that if the doc’s “Allow anyone to copy, print, or export this doc” toggle is set to false, users can’t export tables as CSVs though this has been submitted to the product team as a feature request.
Thanks, I’ll definitely have a look at this when I can as I’m sure I’ll pick up some valuable info! That said, (and I’m making some assumptions here) the canvas controls would need to be personal instead of collaborative and that’s something that’s been expensive in terms of performance when I’ve used that approach for other things on the table in question.
Personal controls won’t have a regular use performance hit. In fact, they can make performance better.
The one place they catch you is on initial doc load. The doc loads with everything that’s collaborative, then appends or calculates the personal control options. That’s the only place you should notice anything different in performance.
If you want to try a pro tip, have the table filtered to show 0 rows collaboratively, then have it add rows you filter for. This allows the doc to load much quicker instead of loading thousands of rows as displayed to start with. I don’t have a quick resource for this ready, and it’s a little tricky, but think through it if you’re wanting to try something new.
