Report not sorting on given column

Stan Ward

I have a report that is not sorting on the column I specified. It was working yesterday, but today it is not working.  It is to-do list report that is sorted by Forced Rank.  I can sort by other columns (e.g., Due Date), but for some reason the Forced Rank sorting is not working anymore.  Forced Rank is a Text/Number.  Forced Rank values are like this: A01, A02, A10, A20, B01, B10, B20, etc.  It was sorting fine yesterday. 

 

Is there something that can happen to a sheet that will prevent a report from sorting rows for a given column?

 

Thank you for any ideas to try for debugging this.

 

Thanks,

Stan

 

P.S. I prefer not to share the report publically as it would require me to share all of my sheets as well.

John Sauber

It will be hard to debug this without sharing more information on the report results. 

 

When I run this, using the same values and column type you state, it works fine for me. Check the direction of the sort (ascending/decending) and make sure that this Forced Rank column is the last column you sort by (if you are sorting on more than one column).

 

My original sheet's rows are in this order for "Forced Rank"

Row 1  A20

Row2  B01

Row3  B10

Row 4  B20

Row 5  A01

Row 6  A02

Row 7  A10

 

When I sort by this column, ascending in a report, the results are in this order:

Row 5  A01

Row 6  A02

Row 7  A10

Row 1  A20

Row2  B01

Row3  B10

Row 4  B20

 

Lastly, if you renamed/deleted a column in the sheet and had already used that column in the report builder criteria (including sort rules), Smartsheet does not propogate that column rename/delete to the report. You have to go into the report builder settings and re-select that column and re-specify its criteria. This may be causing this issue as well.

 

I hope this gets you to where you need to be!

Stan Ward

I went through all of the sheets to check the type and naming and it all seems fine.  I noticed that I had highlighting of changes turned on and tried turning off that.  Somewhere in doing all this, it started working again.  I will try to narrow down the steps to reproduce if it happens again.

 

Thanks,

Stan