I often switch between Data Table and Pivot Table visualizations while I’m deciding out how I want to display information. When I make the switch, anything I have set up for the sorting criteria gets removed.
This toy example should replicate what I’m seeing:
data table of sales per customer, sorted high to low by total sales
switch to pivot table
now there is no sort specified, but it seems to default to alphabetical by customer
sort from high to low by total sales
switch back to data table
now the sort has been wiped out again
It’s not a big problem because you can obviously reenter the sort criteria after switching visualization types, but it’s an inconvenience that feels avoidable.
Just to note: sorting works differently across visualization types, so sort settings don’t directly carry over when switching.
However, we think your main frustration is the UX of having to manually re-apply sorting every time you switch - not the mechanism itself. Is that right?
Yup! Just the manual effort of re-applying the sort. Moving between other visualizations it may make sense to drop the sort settings. Data table and pivot table seem so related that maybe it makes sense to keep the sort settings?
Hi, thanks for bringing this up. I totally get the frustration of having to re-sort everything after a switch.
We’re actually working on an auto-switch algorithm to solve this. The goal is to make the tool smart enough to carry over your configuration intent. Your use case should be covered in this update.