Special/differentiated feature idea:
Transposed Table View where the Rows are Fields and the Columns are Entities.
Background for this request:
I’m still trying to migrate my entire life & business from Coda, Notion, & SmartSuite over to Fibery. Much of what I do is financial analysis & accounting, which often involves more calculations than categories (i.e., more Fields than Entities), which are usually transposed in traditional spreadsheets. In Coda I accomplished this in 3 very hacky ways:
Inserted field values into basic Grids via custom formulas in every single cell (ugh)
Built purely visual companion Tables with huge Switch/Case statements to dynamically populate remote data in each row (ugh again)
Built an enormous matrix [with an even bigger Switch formula] and used their multi-axis Grouping to invert the Rows & Columns in a rather complex ‘Table’ view (ugh thrice)
And then it dawned on me… Fibery could potentially add yet another uniquely-differentiated visualization option for certain industries & applications by enabling users to Transpose their data in a Table view.
The only ~meh workaround I’ve come up with so far is using Board View with Large size Cards to display Field names. But with this less dense Board View I’m unable to:
Display Field names in a left-side column (or really anywhere left-aligned)
Have narrower columns since Small & Medium Cards remove the Field names
Right-align numerical data, as everything becomes left aligned, making $magnitudes harder to spot
The other reason I want a native-supported View is to enable edits immediately in context, since the raw data would actually “live” in that editable cell, removing the need to navigate elsewhere to modify source data. Does that make sense?
Just trying to help y’all stand out even more with a cool capability no one else has yet. It can’t be that hard, right?
My initial reaction to the title of this post was that database rows and tabular data are different and you’ll likely be able to achieve the view/functionality you need by restructuring your data.
But after reading the context, I think your post may be too abstract for me to understand.
Do you have an example like the one below that you could expand upon?
Recently I was transposing a Notion template to Fibery and noted that the original used columns to track sales goals per product and each row is a month of the year. This is an example of a time where refactoring is definitely the way to go and the spreadsheet like view of the data is harder to come by in Fibery (although possible with greater ease in Coda)
Hi Enoma, thanks so much for chiming in. See the attached versions I created in both Coda and Notion. I 100% agree that data often needs to be refactored from freeform spreadsheets into proper database schemas (I have extensive experience doing that). The issue isn’t backend data storage, relationships, hierarchies, etc., but rather frontend visualization for easier consumption, interpretation, conclusions. My screenshots show how each parent real estate Deal I analyze can have multiple child Assumptions as subtable Entities displayed in columns, all sharing the same calculations which are the Fields displayed in rows. Transposing all this data was SO MUCH easier said than done, ha! But it’s also MUCH easier to digest this way.
This is one of the use cases I usually prefer to do in Coda and not Fibery at all.
That said, I’m shocked/amazed you pulled it off in Notion at all. That’s really impressive!
While the Report View → Table could get you some of the visual layout you need you wouldn’t have the ability to edit the “cells.” That’s something I run into often when building my own dashboards in Fibery the tension between embedding a view (that may be visually clunky but preserves editability) and embedding a report.
I’d be curious about how other Fibery users would solve this. I don’t have any working solutions myself.
I have this painpoint constantly as well. Fibery is absolutely terrible when it comes to creating anything “dashboard”-like. It’s very frustrating that something as basic as displaying 2 editable fields side by side requires creating a separate view with tables, and then embedding that view into another view.
I really wish Fibery has a responsive grid-layout system where fields and views could be easily added and positioned as “blocks” instead of being stuck with only 1 or 2 largely non-flexible columns with vertically stacked fields. Clickup’s and Hubspot’s Dashboards are some simple examples of what I’m talking about.
Having “Embed Field” as an option within rich text fields would be great place to start
Update for everyone regarding my sandbox experiment (see screenshot below).
Nutshell:
I created 27 separate databases for each of my calculations [as rows] with matching field names [as columns], then stacked them all together via 27 levels in a single table. It surprisingly kinda works, but there are obvious drawbacks.
Pros:
The input fields are actually editable in this view, even with formulas above and below.
I can nest subtables (like Income/Expense items) under their rollup calculations.
Cons:
Noticably slower load times when rendering this complex view.
I had to change the Percent fields to Number fields with suffix ‘%’ and account for the 100x factor everywhere. This is because Fibery wouldn’t let me stack-combine Money and Percent.
I had to nest all 27 calculations under a parent Deal toggle to avoid seeing as many “+New Entity” buttons below the table.
I don’t like having 27 databases for calculations that should be fields. I.e., I don’t like designing [bad] schemas around such UI/UX limitations.
Conclusion:
A native transpose option would be super sweet. Then I could store and view my data properly, optimizing both backend and frontend simultaneously. Much love.
It can’t be that hard, right? 
