A few times this week I found myself wanting to group by something that is related to an existing property. Ex: Group tasks by the due date’s relationship to today (Overdue, Due Today, Tomorrow, Future) or Group tasks for this week by the week day of the due date (in a board view of tasks).
At present, I would need to create a formula that returns the value I want to group by. Then create a select field for each if/conditional value. Finally, I would need to use an automation to update the select field to match the value in the formula field when it changes.
A similar workaround was mentioned here:
An ideal experience would be only creating 1 field that is a formula but the results are treated as select values. This way we can group by the options.
The example you mentioned is focussed on date-related grouping. Do you have other use case examples, that are not date-related?
The reason I ask is that the ideal experience for your example would not require creating a formula at all, just being able to treat a date field as a select field i.e. add support for grouping (by day, week, month, etc. and optionally as related to the current day, week, month).
But is a case for more than just dates. A status indicator formula would usually depend on multiple fields. I’m borrowing from a popular strategy used when making task databases in Notion. The formula might take into account the Priority Level field, the Project Type, and due date.
A low priority, overdue task that belongs to internal marketing project may return “Reschedule”
but a high priority task due today that belongs to a client project would return “Top Priority”
This would solve so much for us. We created a very heavy planning solution to achieve this. Since most of our clients are used to Notion or Clickup. And they offer group by date/period.
We are currently redesigning this planning module since the amount of mnthly automations may result in an enterprise subscription for small business owners. Which sucks
