Wrap Text within column

NP! We do have an ellipsis at the end of truncated cells: . Would that help?

An option to turn off icons in the column headings would go a long way to be honest. Unless your account type is Creator, they don’t really offer much value.

For example Im managing a project. One of the fields would be notes where we have bulleted them maybe 5 maybe 15 bullets for easy visual reference. They are not detailed tasks per se but a quick formatted reference. By having a mode/view where I could show the full text would be helpful.

Here is an example of a table in word/excel. It looks good cause it summarizes information visually.

And here is the same information as I manage it in Airtable. A lot more functionality for me, but this easy visualization is lost

And by adding ability to do rich text would be awesome too!

While the option for wrapped text in cells would be most desirable, at the very least it might be nice to offer a hover option for long strings of text in cells, just as you’ve already implemented with the field detail functionality. While this wouldn’t solve the easy visual overview that many people are asking for, it would at least give users the option of quickly pointing to each cell for a quick mouseover tooltip of what’s in it without having to open up each record (either fully or with the shift+spacebar function.

Really need the ability to wrap text! Lack of this features limits me using airtable in my company because it is too big of a change in behavior to do a gallery view / kanban when we are all used to wrap text in excel / google sheet.

@Airtable_Support @Airtable_Team

+1 for the option to wrap text. It would really help for quick reading in Grid View to be able to view more than a few words in a cell without clicking in.

Wrapping text in cells is a must-have for us-it is cumbersome to have to page through the detail views to read the cell text.

That being said, I find the detail view extremely useful when I do want to focus on one record. The issue here is that I want to scan quickly for an overview, which is very difficult with today’s lack of text wrap.

+1 for ‘wrap text’ option in cells. I’d like to use Airtable for qualitative data analysis and this is pretty much the ONLY feature that is preventing me from doing that.

I don’t deal with enough data to warrant using nvivo or some other big data software. But I deal with enough complex information (from multiple sources, gathered through multiple ways, e.g. interviews, focus groups, surveys, internal and public documents) that just Excel / Word is not good enough.

It’d be easier to have the information in a database for sorting / resorting / refining. i.e. All the reasons you want a database over a spreadsheet. But in qualitative analysis you need to be able to read and re-read the data over and over again to condense / pull out themes and code / re-code. So wrap text is essential.

(A ready to go template for this in the future that would also be amazing.)

Thanks.

+1 for wrap text in cells–REALLY need it for effective qualitative data management. At the very, very least, hover to display would help alleviate the problem.

+1 for wrap text in column headings. I could fit twice as much on the screen if I could manage my column titles’ white space.

These are my only nitpicky complaints with airtable (well these and linking between bases… :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: ) Thanks for a fabulous product!

I have written in this thread before and it seems some people are talking about wrapping text within column in the data section and others (e.g. myself) in the title.

I would like to put some emphasis on the title wrapping – which includes optional column-type icon (pretty useless if you use the base every single day) and optional ellipsis as well.

When I need to make a few adjacent columns very narrow to have more fields visible, I have to remember in which order the columns are or what type they are, or their exact titles (ie. the initial) otherwise I’m driving blind. This is a very common scenario for me and I assume it’s also very likely for those handling many fields

Hi All - We desperately need to be able to wrap linked records in a Gallery view. We’re using Airtable for resourcing and one of the great ways we find to use it is in Gallery view, by staff member. We’ve linked each project to a staff member but we can only see one or two in the gallery view because of the lack of wrapping.
Please help!

Thanks, Audrey

See below. Where’s the fifth project???

Similar to a few of the above points, we’re currently trialling Airtable as a better way to store, organise and link qualitative research data. When creating profiles of our users for instance, we need a way for gallery view to include the entire (2-3 line) text descriptions of each role. The glance value of having all of the information on one screen - even if people have to scroll through multiple records - far exceeds the use of having a neat arrangement of identical row heights. Being able to manually adjust how much of each field is displayed on each card during gallery view would be of massive benefit.

Lack of wrapped text is a major obstacle for us adopting Airtable more broadly in our organization. Employee onboarding is a great example.

Airtable is nearly perfect for an employee onboarding checklist because each task has a name, a description, a point of contact, attachments, and a checkbox/status to indicate completion. However, descriptions are lost without wrapped text, even with the trailing dots. This applies to any well-formatted table (@Haiyan_Khan posted a great example).

The larger issue I see is this: the primary champions / early adopters of Airtable are the kind of people who have been maintaining well-formatted tables on their own for years, and see Airtable as a great way to make a lot of their existing work effortless. However, those well-formatted Excel/Google Sheets tables cannot make the transition to Airtable without the wrapped text feature, so organizations like mine end up straddling both

I’m doing event planning right now, and horizontal density is much more important than vertical density. Some event notes on vendors would fit great on two lines for easy visibility.

There is a limited work-around to give you up to four lines of text display in kanban or gallery views that works well with roll-up fields; however, it does require either a manual step or Zapier integration to perform. In brief, you configure a roll-up field using ARRAYJOIN() as an aggregation function and the Unix linefeed character (\n) as separator. Then, you copy the column containing the roll-up field and paste it into a column containing a multi-line text field; when displayed as part of a kanban or gallery view, the first four lines (or, at least, the first XX characters of the first four lines) are displayed.

I’ve extracted the applicable pages from the Users Guide to my Wardrobe Manager base that describes how to set up the fields and perform the copy/paste. Again, it’s not a perfect solution, and it’s limited to four lines per field, but it might serve as a workaround for now.

I see this as a considerable issue. Please let me know if there is a fix.

Announcement from the Airtable team: we are introducing beta of a new feature that lets you change the height of rows in a grid view.

You can configure each grid view to show 1, 2, 4, or 6 lines of wrapped text in its cells. With the additional height, we’ll also show larger attachment thumbnails, more linked records, and more multiple select options.

You can sign up for early access to the row height feature using our beta feature access form.

I have started using the beta of the row heights and it is really useful. Even if the row height is 2, we can now see the thumbnail of pictures of components on our stock view. On our CRM view, recent conversations logged in a notes entry show my summary of the most recent interaction.

Great addition @Matt_Bush and the airtable team!

Hi everyone! As Matt mentioned above, we now have a row height feature (officially launched today!) that will allow you to adjust row height in grid views to display more text, larger images, more select field options, and more collaborator/linked record tokens.

Pick from one of four different row height settings to control the density of your records. Stick with the default short height to maximize the number of records you can see on your screen, or pick tall to see larger images and more text per each record.

Read more about it here. (If you can’t see the row height button, try refreshing the page.)

Thank you very much for this feature!

I second this. Title/Header wrapping to me is even more important than cell wrapping. Row height solves the cell wrapping issue but why has the header been ignored?

This is a huge request from me as well. The ability to text wrap the Field name is very important. As many others have stated, sometimes you don’t need such a wide column - Checkbox, Dates and other short data entries would allow more fields to be included on the screen. We use Airtable to manage our real estate transactions and display the details to a flat screen to see an immediate visual of the current status of items.

PLEASE HELP US ALL BY ADDING THIS FEATURE…