I Broke My Google Sheet, Some Thoughts

I’m not certain what I did but I noticed today that my Descriptions prior to a certain date (12/21/2024) were not matching up with my Full Descriptions. Example:

Description: Martin’s
Full Description: McDonalds

Everything from current to 12/21/2024 was OK but everything prior to 12/21 was not matched. It wasn’t like things shifted and I could easily fix it by shifting up or down. The order has canged.

I’m not sure what I did but maybe some things I do are not good practice.

  1. I do a lot of filtering. I notice that sometimes the filter does not include all the data so I have to clear the filters and reapply. Sometimes I forget but I can’t really see how this could cause the issue.
  2. I also noticed that not all the columns had a filter on them. I need to check but do hidden columns have the filter applied? This makes more sense that maybe I did a sort on 12/21 but didn’t include all the columns.

I’m not sure what else I could have done wrong. I kept the latest file and made a copy (not restore) of the last known good file after reviewing all the revision history. I connected that copy and will disconnect the original (broke) file from Tiller. I’ve got a lot of verification work as Tiller filled in 731 transactions when I reconnected.

I will need to be a lot more careful when using filters. I suspect my problem came from being careless with them. Tables (range of filters) are tied to the last row and column when turned on. When a new transaction is added, oldest transactions fall outside the filter. The columns and rows have to be reselected and the filters turned off and on to apply to all data.

I wonder if others might have had this problem, what they think might have caused it and how they recovered.

Finally… thank goodness for Google’s revision history. I was able to find the last good file and connect it to Tiller.

I have been there too. I did this with my Categories sheet and boy does it mess things up. I think it must have been sorted when only certain columns were selected. Who knows. But yes thank goodness for versioning.

1 Like

Not sure if this applies, but one trick I learned about filtering is that you only need to have a single cell selected in the range when you turn on filter mode. Google Sheets will automatically determine the full range (and more reliably than I can). For the situation where new rows were added since the filter was applied, I turn off filter mode, then turn it on again to get the full range.

Note that you’ll lose any filters applied when you do this. Do you use Filter Views?

2 Likes

I didn’t realize that about turning on the filters. Easier and safer than the way I was doing it. Thank you.

1 Like

Thanks for that note @brettanicus :sweat: