How to Let Users Reorder Records in an Airtable Interface

Let's say you have built an Airtable Interface where your team can view and work with records.

Everything works fine, but now you want people to control the order of those records themselves.

Maybe you have a list of tasks and want people to prioritize them by dragging them up and down. Or maybe the records need to appear in a particular order when someone reviews them.

You try dragging a record in the Interface, but nothing happens.

Airtable does support manual reordering in Interfaces. You just need to enable the right settings.

Airtable Interface using Manual sort and inline editing to let users drag records into a new order.

Enable manual sorting

Open your Interface and click on the Grid, List, or Kanban where you want people to reorder records.

In the settings on the right, go to Sort by and choose Manual sort.

Airtable will then ask you to choose a manual sort field. You can use an existing one or create a new one.

This is the field Airtable uses behind the scenes to remember the order of your records.

There is one more setting you need to turn on: Edit records inline.

So your setup should have:

Sort by → Manual sort

and

Edit records inline → On

Once both are enabled, users can drag the records into the order they want, and Airtable will remember that order.

For example, if you have five tasks and someone decides Task 5 should be first, they can simply drag it to the top instead of changing another field just to control the order.

Which layouts support manual sorting?

Manual sorting works with Grid, List, and Kanban in Airtable Interfaces.

So you can use the same setup whether you have a simple list of tasks, a grid of records, or cards arranged in a Kanban.

The important part is that the visualization needs to use Manual sort and allow inline editing.

What about Gallery?

Gallery is the one layout where this does not work.

Airtable does not currently support Manual sort in Gallery, so you cannot drag cards around to arrange them in your own order.

If you need manual reordering, you will have to use Grid, List, or Kanban instead.