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Requesting an actual field type for tasks.

I’m working around this with the long text field by adding checkbox bullets but I can’t see how many complete vs incomplete tasks I have without expanding every single long text field.

Trellos Checklists - I love trello’s checklists because you can do a single paste and trello will recognize and convert each item into its own checklist item.

for example:
this is my first task
this is my second task
this is my third task

hit “ENTER”
automatically turns into:

SmartSuite cannot recognize the multiple lines and split into multiple tasks yet but they still have a checklist field that shows a running total of completed vs incomplete tasks at a glance. Very cool feature.

anyone else find value in the checklist field?

Hey @Brian_LWA,


This still won’t be as nice as Trello’s checklist fields, but here’s how I make this experience a bit nicer in Airtable. I have my “subtasks” in a long text field called Notes, which you’ll see referenced in the formulas below – replace with your long text field name.



  1. Create a formula field Open Subtasks with this formula


(LEN(Notes) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(Notes, "I ]", ""))) / 3


  1. Create a formula field Completed Subtasks with this formula


(LEN(Notes) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(Notes, "Ix]", ""))) / 3


  1. Create a formula field Total Subtasks with this formula


{Open Subtasks} + {Completed Subtasks}


  1. Create a formula field Subtasks % Completed with this formula


IF({Total Subtasks}, {Completed Subtasks} / {Total Subtasks})


  1. Create a formula field Subtasks with this formula


IF(

  {Total Subtasks},

  {Completed Subtasks} & '/' & {Total Subtasks} & ' subtasks '

) &

IF(

  {Total Subtasks},

  IF(

    {Subtasks % Completed} < 1,

    '⭕️',

    '✅'

  )

)


  1. Hide all but this final Subtasks field


Result


Doesn’t help with seeing the actual text of your subtasks – I don’t have a good solution for that in Airtable. But it does at least give you that visual prompt of whether or not you need to expand and look at those subtasks. There’s also a nice little perk that these formulas don’t care if all your subtasks are grouped together in the Notes field – it will find them anywhere; so you can freely put inline tasks as you think of them, interspersed as you please between your notes.


🙂

Very helpful @Jeremy_Oglesby. I’ll definitely add this in for now as a temporary solution but I think the checklist feature that Trello and SmartSuite have is a MUST as that’s such a highly used feature for productivity. Thank you for writing all this out!

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