Newbie question - Sorting arrow not visible in dynamic dimension in freeform table. How to sort?

[LiaZa]

I'd like to sort a dimension alphabetically, but I don't see an arrow like in this example:

I believe the dimension is dynamic because I don't see a lock symbol on the individual rows when I hover over them:

Any advice on how to sort the column alphabetically would be appreciated. 

[Jennifer_Dungan]

Some of the options are a little inconsistent.... Some dimensions like Dates (Day, Week, Month, Quarters, etc) can be sorted... but when you pull in dimensions, there is no sort of alphabetical order available... This is probably due to them not knowing how many unique values could potentially exist... is the dimension more like a lookup table holding only 20 unique values, or is it a dimension that holds URLs, so there might be millions.

You can sort IF you pull over values one by one (locking your list to a specific sub-set of items)... for example, I track our "Breakpoint" (this is different than the device in use). If I pull over the values individually:

Then there is a very clearly defined number of items, so sorting is available:

If I just create a table with it pulling the values dynamically... there is no sort:

So if you have a relatively small and unchanging set of values, you can drag them in 1 by 1... but there's a big caveat to this... each row will act like a "quick segment", and the table will no longer de-duplicate Visits or Unique Visitors, etc... if you are using a metric that doesn't duplicate like Page Views or Orders, etc.. you should be fine.... but keep this in mind when building out your reports...

You could make a suggestion about this, but I suspect this was removed as a potential performance issue...

[LiaZa]

Thanks for your response! The dimension is a large list of journal names. I'm going to pick my colleague's brain about this. He's very familiar with Adobe Analytics. I'm completely new and was hoping to find the answer on my own (especially if it was an easy answer to find!), but it doesn't sound like there's a simple answer here. I appreciate you taking the time to try to help!

[Jennifer_Dungan]

You're very welcome

Sorry I couldn't provide a way to do what you want...

You could also consider using Report Builder (an add on for Excel that connects Adobe data via an API), then using Excel to sort the values.

[bjoern__koth]

Fully agree with what @Jennifer_Dungan mentions and the caveats/workarounds.

Short answer:

no, this is not possible in Analysis Workspace to sort a dynamic list, whereas it is possible in Customer Journey Analytics

Long answer:

looking at this documentation/knowledge base entry and static dimensions (though I cannot really replicate what they show there with the lock icons), it is confirming what @Jennifer_Dungan initially said: if it is a (short) static list of items (there is a video at the end of the page, explaining the steps), but not your ever growing "Page" dimension, it can be sorted.

On top of that, looking at the Data Warehouse documentation, there you can also only sort by a specific metric which kind of reflects the limitations that you are mentioning here.