tl;dr - You can quickly copy a column with its values and settings, or just its settings, from the column menu in your tables.
We’ve all been there: You’ve made the perfect table with every column formatted perfectly for you and your team’s needs. But as the project expands, you suddenly need to add more data to the table in a new column. While aiming for parity between columns, you realize you have check the settings of your existing column, then create a new column, and then update the column type, settings, formulas, etc. That’s no small amount of time and clicksーand we’re excited to give you all of that time back.
Starting today, you can duplicate any column quickly and easily directly from the column itself. You have two options:
Duplicate the column with values, to make an exact copy
Duplicate the column as an empty column, but with the settings still applied (so, your formulas and/or settingsーlike select list options, whether to show a full name or an avatar for people, etc.ーare retained)
Here’s how:
Choose the column you wish to duplicate
Click on the column header to open the column menu
Select “Duplicate” and then choose what kind of duplicate column you’d like (with or without values)
Your new column will appear directly to the right of your chosen column
You may simply grab and drag columns to a new location if desired
While this is a fantastic improvement, woud it be also possible to have a feature of default settings per column type, pretty please? It’s annoying and time consuming to always do the same formatting for eg. currency and date fields as they default to $ and mm/dd/yyyy which I never use.
And another suggestion, can we have a copy & paste column type and settings, formula, conditional formatting and format (all of these) - feature? This duplicate column is awesome, but only usable within the same table. To reuse column in another table is still manual work.
Just a note, if someone wonders like I did (I first thought it was a bug). Seems that the option for dupicating with empty values is not available if the column has a formula. This kind of makes sense as the values are filled based on the formula.
Idea: Dragging a column with Shift pressed would be a logical and convenient shortcut to do these duplicates.
Been waiting for this for a long long time. As a UK user having to setup each column for £ and using a sensible date format (ie. not the weird American way!) every time was a massive pain in the backside. Hoorah for common sense. As a above a default option for non US users would be useful too - perhaps based on the timezone / locale of the document? Ie. if ‘France’ default to Euros etc. etc.
Great feedback! We understand the need for setting default column settings, especially for dates, currencies and numbers (i.e. 1,000 vs 1.000) where patterns vary by region. This is on our list and we’d like to get to it; hopefully this feature helps a bit in the meantime.
Any other use cases beyond those types where changing default settings would be valuable?
This is something that is really needed! I mean its kind of silly to have to use a long formula just so I can have date in canvas formatted to correct order
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love it!
