How to get Find Record Automation to show in chronological order

Airtable Questions Automations and Integrations
1

I have a weekly Find Records automation set to email all currently booked tradeshows to our leadership team.

Condition is set to pull events where the Start Date is after Yesterday
Find Record Parameters

In the email I have inserted a grid of records which does work BUT the grid is not in chronological order so it is very difficult to read- how can I make this grid show in order of Show Start Date?

2

Here is what the insert grid settings look like:

Insert Grid Specs

3

here is a snippet of the most recent automation- I think it may be showing the records in the order I created them?

grid from most recent automation
grid from most recent automation292Ă—575 26.9 KB

4

Welcome to the community, @jkaelble!

Unfortunately, Airtable’s “find records by condition” step will always grab records in a completely random order that none of us have been able to figure out what that order is!

We thought that it might be creation date, but then it turned out that it wasn’t creation date either.

There is only one known workaround to this issue, which is to find record “by view” instead of “by condition”. If you find a record by a view, it will find the records in the sort order that you have specified on that view.

However, note that there are 2 important warnings here:

  1. If your view is “grouped”, then you will suddenly be thrust back into random order again, so you will need to make sure that your view has no grouping.

  2. Both of Airtable’s find actions — both “find by condition” and “find by view” — will only find a maximum of 100 records. You will never be able to find more than 100 records when using Airtable’s automation actions (unless you write your own custom Javascript).

The no-code/low-code solution to both of these issues would be to use Make’s advanced automations for Airtable, which has no limit on the number of records that it will find, and it also allows you to specify the sort order whenever you perform a find.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is how you would instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable.

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire an expert Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

5

I’m at least a little relieved it wasn’t just me missing a super obvious button somewhere…

Thanks so much for the advice! I will definitely be looking through the links you provided

1 Like