Why doesn't the table sort?

[Shirlee Smith]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Tables

The online help says that you should be able to sort tables in view mode using the table headers. This isn't working on most of the tables in our space. Any ideas what's wrong?

[Milo Test · Accepted solution]

Just for funsies, click-drag select the data in a non-sorting table (or at least a few rows), then create a 1x1 cell table and paste.

I have found that sometimes imported tables don't function right, and this quick table recreation does the trick.

[Shirlee Smith]

Yep, it worked. Thanks for the tip.

[James Whitby]

This didn't work for me. I've got some tables that used to sort, but no longer do so. Not sure if this is due to some change in Confluence, or some accidental side-effect of editing.

Removing the formatting and then recreating the first row as a table header did not help.

[James Whitby]

This behaviour turns out to be a browser issue. On a Mac (macOS 10.13.2) in Safari (with JavaScript enabled) I don't see the sortable table header, but in Opera I do.

[Rahav]

This occurred to me as well when I had some rows that had multiple numbers on the same row, in the column I was trying to sort by. Example:

                                        Topic                                       | Value |
--------------------------------------------+------+
 this will sort well                                                        |  3         |
--------------------------------------------+------+
 as well as this row                                                     |  2         |
--------------------------------------------+------+
 but this will not                                                           |  4         |
 even if you want to keep these two together    |  2         |
--------------------------------------------+------+

It was of course fixed by separating the conflicting row to two rows.

[Shirlee Smith]

It's been some time now, but as I recall, the problem went away when the row content was simple, as Rahav suggests. Thanks.

[Shirlee Smith]

No, on the tables that don't sort, the two little triangles do not appear.

I usually work in the WYSIWYG editor, so the request for some code gave me an idea that perhaps the header row wasn't properly set on the table that doesn't sort. It wasn't, so I inserted a new row, made it the header, and deleted the old quasi-header row. It still doesn't sort, but the code looks the same to me as the code for the table that does have the little triangles and sorts. Here's the code for the beginning of the table that doesn't sort, including the header row:

<table>
  <tbody>
    <tr>
      <th colspan="1">Writer</th>
      <th colspan="1">Scrum Teams</th>
      <th colspan="1">Subject Areas Covered</th>
      <th colspan="1">PDFs</th>
    </tr>

This table does have some empty cells in the first column. Could that be the problem?

[Steffen Heller]

There are a lot of ideas. But without any further information it is pure guessing.

Can you post some code or screenshots?

[Milo Test]

First things first, when you hover over a column head, do two little triangles appear?