Sorting the entries of the source box
Hi, how can I sort the sources of my source box alphatically? Now its sort by create time. I already use files for birth, marriage, death records….
Answers
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Unfortunately, the Source Box does not currently have the option to sort alphabetically. Too bad, I know!
I'm sure you have tried, but if not, you can click the "OPTIONS" button on the top right of the Sources page. From there you can sort them by Date (ascending/descending) or by Custom.
The "Custom" option might work for you here. You can go drag the individual sources into the order you would like. If there are many sources, that might be problematic, but if there are few, you can sort them alphabetically. And when you return to the Source box, they will still remain in that order.
Thanks for your patience with the FamilySearch tools!
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Hi, is there any timeline for this feature?
Or a page to request it?
Or a page to possibly boost the request's urgency.
My research is so inefficient without it.
Thanks,
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You can suggest an idea here. From that page, you can read a description of the process and fill in a form to submit your suggestion. After you have done that, your suggestion will be reviewed by FamilySearch.
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Whilst you may wish to follow the suggestion to fill in the form at "Suggest An Idea", you will not be advised of any timescale for implementing your idea and will probably only know whether the developers have agreed to your idea when you see has become an option. (i.e., you would suddenly find you can sort the Source Box alphabetically.)
Just a warning - after around ten months of details of users' suggestions not being openly published on this forum, we have no clue as to how may ideas have been submitted during that period, let alone their progress "down the line", or in what way they will be prioritised after being passed to the "relevant" FamilySearch teams for consideration.
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If you are desperate, there is one option I tried that has a few minutes of front time investment but works well:
- Go to your source box, scroll down as far as you want to load as much of it as possible.
- Click and drag over as much of it as you want.
- Copy and paste into your favorite spreadsheet. You will get blank rows and rows that just say "Attach." You can sort now to group them and delete them all at once or do that later.
- In the second column of the spreadsheet paste a formula to cut off the four numbers of the date, the comma, and the space that precede the title. In Numbers it is TEXTAFTER(source-string, search-string, occurrence) (I don't know if it is called the same in Excel or if Google Sheets has a similar formula.) In this case TEXTAFTER(source-string, ", ",1)
- Sort on that second column to get your alphabetized list.
Now you have your alphabetized list, you can highlight in the first column (the original entry, not the formula result) a portion of the title of the one you are looking for and use your browser's Find command to jump to it in your source box:
After the spreadsheet is first set up, you can copy over the titles every time you have created a couple of dozen more and just keep extending the number of rows.
The hardest part of this was finding the right formula and figuring out how it worked. The most time consuming part was scrolling down to the bottom of my source box. I only have a couple of thousand, mainly marriage records that are saved automatically that I haven't gotten around to deleting yet.
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Yes. It's really important to keep a copy of what you suggest, since as soon as you submit the idea it will appear to vanish without trace. We are however assured that they are all kept and looked at, though they may be removed if (I paraphrase) they aren't considered constructive/relevant.
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Thank you to everyone who replied. I wasn't aware of how the Suggestion process works, but now I know what to expect.
It seems there is little, if any, transparency from the dev end. Very disappointing.
Keeping end-users in the loop is a great way to foster community support, but it's not so when there is only silence.
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Thank you, Gordan, for your wonderful ideas and visual aids. I have thought about having an external list of sources, and now seems like a good time to experiment.
I tried to find a way to respond to your post directly but haven't found a way. Possibly, I missed it.
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FS does collaborate effectively with users on certain projects, mainly it seems those that are officially designated as 'Labs'.
It is unclear why the rest of the development team can't provide the same transparency given that the Community Group based mechanisms for such collaboration clearly exist.
I get that user beta testing might be harder to allow for in more tightly embedded parts of the system, but open discussion doesn't introduce risk, it makes a user community feel valued and therefore supported, as @LRLNorma says; as shown in the case of the Data Quality Score where in my view the collaboration was really productive and resulted in (as far as I can see) very few issues being raised in Community now that it is live.
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