Tracking changes over time

Hi! I’m trying to create a dataset that will track changes-over-time for scoring attributed to different individual entities, and having a second table/chart lookup the most recent values for all of the entities. I had been doing this in Google Docs by way of a custom formula that would allow me to use a different table for each entity and pull out the table name to use as a field as well as the last row that was entered.

In Grist I’m trying to organize the data in a more logical way, by where it comes / who enters it instead of just a ‘weekly’ summary entered for each entity.

Am I going about this the right/wrong way? Was having a table for each entity with rows entered chronologically easier to work with in Grist rather than having tables organized by “data source” with entries entered whenever?

Thanks.

1 Like

Hello @Jason_Martinez!

You are right that in Grist it’s better to keep all records in a single table, and distinguish them by source. There are a few benefits you can get this way.

  1. When entering data, you can set up formulas to automatically fill in who created the row, and the time it was creating, using Authorship and Timestamp columns.

  2. If different records are tied to different entities, you can set up a Reference column tying the record to the entity, and create a Linked view so that selecting the entity you’ll see all the records for that entity.

  3. You can set up a view of most recent values by creating a formula column “IsMostRecent” that has the value True only for the most recent value (for a particular entity), and create a view filtered to only show records where IsMostRecent is True. I’d guess this is the trickiest part (may be best to do using summary tables and/or the lookupOne() or lookupRecords() functions). If you can share a sample document (you can make up one without sensitive data and link-share it), I’d be happy to help with this formula part.