[MarjaE]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

You shouldn't have ever needed to go into Preferences?

And the author column shouldn't have kept disappearing...

And you don't need to type every {author} and {author_sort} -- just the ones that are different from the default calculation:
FN, LN <--> LN, FN

I'm trying to get a consistent standard for author sort in each library, different in a history library than a fiction library. In a history library, I could use a mix of n, and n, cn, pn, and ln, fn, and ln, fn, depending on the authors. In a fiction library, I just can't deal with a mix of n and ln, fn, so I'm standardizing everything on either n, or fn, ln.

If you want to use all {authors} as {author_sort}, without recalculating, go to Preferences ==> Advanced ==> Tweaks
And check out the Tweak for "Author sort name algorithm".

It has a "copy" option which uses the FN LN {authors} value as-is.

I can't really make sense of the tweaks, but thanks.