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Question

Change the text formatting of a Lookup or Rollup field??

K
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Hello :) I’m not sure if this is possible but I would really appreciate any input or advice…

 

I am overseeing the gig booking process for a band. I have 2 tables:

  • Bookings
  • Events

In the Events table I have a summary field which concatenates various pieces of data about the event. I want to use this so that, when I am looking at the overall Booking, I can see a summary of all the info for each Events that is part of that Booking. The formula for this summary field is:

 

CONCATENATE("\nEvent Name: "&{🟣 Event Name}&"\nDate: "&{🟣 Event Date (pretty)}&"\nEvent Time: "&{🟣 Event Time (pretty)}&"\nInfo on sound reqs: "&{Long text field 1}&"\nInfo about parking and dressing rooms: "&{Long text field 2}&"\n")

 

At the moment I am pulling it into the Bookings table as a Lookup, but I think it could also come through as a Rollup. Once it’s in the Bookings table, I have an automation that copies it into a long text field so that the \n formatting splits up the data and makes it easier to read. This is how it’s pulling through at the moment:

My question is whether it’s possible to format the output so that:

  1. I can bold the text that is shown in bold in the formula above - is there a way to build this into the summary field formula in the same way that I have added in the \n line breaks? (sorry, I’m quite new to formula building!)
  2. I can get rid of the comma between each record that pulls through as part of the default Lookup/Rollup formatting

Any help gratefully received!

3 replies

TheTimeSavingCo
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Hmm, does this look right?

If so, it works by:

  1. Turning on rich text formatting for the ‘Notes’ field
  2. Adding in ‘**’ to bold the text we want, and here’s a list of the all the styles we can use 
    1. CONCATENATE(
  '**Event Name**: ', 
  {Event Name}, 
  '\n**Date**: ',
  Date
)

       

  3. Making the rollup field’s separator be two new lines like so:  
    1. ARRAYJOIN(values, '\n\n')

       

 

And I’ve set it up here for you to check out!

Adam, Consultant @ thetimesaving.company
K
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  • Kate_R
  • Author
  • New Participant
  • 1 reply
  • April 11, 2025

Thanks so much for your reply, and for taking the time to help me! :) The Airtable Community is brilliant 🙌 

Part 3 of your suggestion (the ARRAYJOIN part) works brilliantly and is exactly what I need.

For the first part (the bold-ing of the text in the summary) it’s not working for some reason, and I’m seeing the ** within the final text. I’ve double checked that rich text formatting is on, and can’t see an error in my code, but I'm sure it’s just a rookie mistake. Might you be able to spot what I’ve done wrong?!…

Here is the formula in the Events table Summary field:

CONCATENATE('**Event Name**: ',{🟣 Event Name},'\n**Date**: ',{🟣 Event Date (pretty)},'\n**Event Time**: ',{🟣 Event Time (pretty)},'\n**Info on sound reqs**: ',{Long text field 1},'\n**Info about parking and dressing rooms**: ',{Long text field 2})

Here is the formatting of the Notes (summary) field in Bookings:

And here is what I’m seeing when the text from the rollup field is copied/pasted into the Notes field:

 

Thankyou :)

TheTimeSavingCo
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Hmm, could I confirm that it’s populated via an automation pasting the value in?  When we copy and paste manually it doesn’t work, but if we get the automation to paste it in it’ll work! 

If you’re already doing that, I’d need to investigate your set up I’m afraid.  If you could DM me a read-only invite to a duplicated copy of your base with some example data in it I’d be happy to take a look!

Adam, Consultant @ thetimesaving.company

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