When AI sorting stickies by topic, many stickies get removed or modified.

Hi Zohra!  Thanks for reporting.

I tried this out locally, and as far as I can tell, the issue is that "sort stickies" only sorts actual stickies: it doesn’t sort anything else, including shapes with text in your example.  There isn't a way to make a real sticky into any other shape.  (unless I'm missing something)

I can understand why you might want to sort other types of content - it can be surprising in cases like yours here! - but a couple of points to note:

1. If we haven't sorted the content, there's no way to know where it would go in the output 
2. The content isn't lost - sorting stickies creates copies of the originals and sorts those - though I can see why it could be confusing if a user thinks that everything has been copied across and then deletes the originals

I’ve logged a feature request for us to make "sort stickies" into something like "sort content" (including shapes with text, and maybe text nodes?) - which we’ll take a look at when we get a chance!

Also, I tried to reproduce the problem you mentioned with stickies changing colors, but didn’t manage to.  Do you know if there’s anything special that you need to do to see that happen?

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the speedy response!

I see that the feature is for stickies only. I have a few ideas:

1. If you need to keep it to sorting stickies only, I’d suggest more or custom sticky colors, or sticky tags, so that we don’t need to resort to using shapes when we run out of sticky colors. (In my case I had around 25 interview participants so I needed to have a different sticky color for each one!)
2. If able to sort by shapes as well, “sort content” would be great. I think AI features can still be really helpful for text inside shapes. Even text blocks can benefit from AI features. For example, yesterday I had long “key insights” and “ideas” text blocks that I would have loved to have AI summarize or even create stickies out of.

3. If #2 is possible, it would also be really helpful to be able to select everything and choose a certain types within that group, and to see the count of them. If I could “select stickies (109)”, “select shapes (35)”, “select text blocks (2)” for example. This way, I could select everything, drill down to just “stickies” and “text blocks”, and have AI summarize them together. (This could also help when trying to move or change the color or size of things in bulk, for example. Or to bulk add signatures to stickies.) Right now when multiple item types are selected there are only alignment and “Organize” options, so it’s hard to make large changes or cleanups.

I tried to replicate the issue of stickies getting removed when AI sorting stickies. Some did get removed the first time I tried today, but not any of the subsequent times. (Although it was hard to tell without being able to compare a count of stickies.) It might be an inconsistent issue or an issue which only happens early on? I’m not sure, I will try a bit more and let you know if I encounter it again.

You’re right that the stickies don’t change colors. I had thought they did because my original unsorted screenshot had a lot more colors (because shapes were included), but my sorted screenshot had a lot less colors (because all the shapes were excluded).

I see what you mean about the color limitations.  It looks like we’re limited to 10 colors at the moment (custom palettes appear to be 9); and I guess even if that limitation weren’t there, it might be tricky to tell all the various colors apart if you had 25 of them! :)

I’ve logged a few more feature requests from the above, so thanks for your feedback!  From all of these, my guess is that sort content” would be the easiest for us to do: it could do the same sorting as what we already have, but just take in the text from more types of content.  It’s on the list - hopefully we can take a look soon! - though we’re working on lots of things at the moment so can’t make any promises on the timeline.

For stickies being removed: that’s worrying if you’re losing content.  Do you mean that it’s removing the original sticky when you’re running the sort, or it’s just not copying it to the output?  I presumed the latter - but I guess either would be a problem.  If they’re stickies then they should definitely be copied across somewhere or other!

No original stickies are removed or modified! Just occasionally from the output.

Thanks so much for looking into this feedback!

Glad you’re not losing the original content at least!  We’ll keep an eye out for the bug where they’re not being copied to the output though: definitely want to make at least all stickies move across :)  Let us know if you find a reliable reproduction case and we can look at it directly!