How grouping works in Visual DB sheets

Grouping is a core feature of Visual DB Sheets. It helps you organize and analyze your data in two powerful ways:

• Organization: Records with shared characteristics are automatically clustered together. For instance, when managing tasks, you can group them by priority. The groups are visually separated into high, medium, and low-priority tasks, making it easy to spot tasks in each group.
• Dynamic Summaries: Fields can be summarized to analyze your data. For example, when tracking project tasks grouped by priority and status, you can see cost totals and average durations at each grouping level—from the overall summary down to each priority level and status. These summaries automatically update as you update data or when you filter, making it easy to spot trends and patterns at different levels of detail.

While grouping is a common feature across database tools, many implementations fall short:

• Some tools limit you to one level of grouping, limiting analysis flexibility
• Others offer multiple levels but struggle with scale, either hiding groups or limiting visible records
• Many lack summarization capabilities
• Some can sort records within each group but can't sort the groups themselves

Powerful grouping features

At Visual DB, we've invested significant engineering effort to build what we believe is the industry's most comprehensive grouping implementation in a spreadsheet-like tool. Here's what sets Visual DB apart.

Multiple levels of grouping

You can group records across multiple levels. For example, organize tasks by Department, then Project, then Status—creating a clear hierarchy that makes it easy to analyze data at any level of detail. There is no preset limit to the number of levels of nesting.

Performance and scale

Grouping does not impact the performance or scale of Visual DB. With groups expanded or collapsed, Visual DB can display up to 100,000 records in the browser, with smooth scrolling—no pagination or previous/next buttons needed. For larger datasets with millions of records, you can use query parameters to load specific subsets of data.

Group by ID with custom captions

When grouping by unique identifiers like employee IDs, you can display meaningful captions for each group instead of the IDs themselves. For example, when grouping tasks by employee, you can use the employee ID to ensure groups are unique (avoiding confusion between two “John Smith”s) while displaying full employee names as group headers. This gives you both accurate grouping and readable group headers.

Custom group ordering

Most products only offer alphabetical sorting of groups (ascending or descending), leading to unintuitive orderings. For example, when grouping by priority, alphabetical sorting gives you either “High, Low, Medium” or “Medium, Low, High” — but never the logical order “High, Medium, Low”. Visual DB solves this by letting you specify a separate field to control group order, ensuring your groups appear in the sequence that makes sense for your data.

Order groups by totals

Visual DB can order groups based on their totals, not just by group names. For example, when tasks are grouped by project, you can sort projects by their total cost, total hours, or number of tasks—instantly revealing your most expensive projects, time-intensive projects, or largest projects. This lets you identify important patterns and focus on the groups that matter most to your analysis.

Setting the standard

Whether you're updating sales, tracking project status, or managing tasks by priority, Visual DB's powerful grouping capabilities help you organize and understand your data. With unlimited nesting levels, custom ordering, dynamic summaries, and smooth performance, you have the flexibility to analyze your data exactly how you need to—without compromising on speed or usability.