Wrap Text within column

A bit late but … Row height is great, I’m loving it.

I would still like the column header wrapping to be considered and implemented. Quoting my very own post above Wrap Text within column you can see how I would have a difficult time figuring out what’s what by just seeing a column-type icon a letter or two and an ellipsis.

I would definitely love if you could consider my suggestion here Wrap Text within column or at least allow to remove the icon to maximize space for title characters.

I’m in the same boat where I really would need AirTable to support manual line breaks in Grid View. I can’t reproduce a simple event sign-up sheet with multiple participants as shown below. The grouping feature just doesn’t help as it repeats the name of the sign-up.

I moved almost everything for my company off Airtable to notion.so because the lack of wrapped text made it insufferable.

One example – I have a few columns for recruiting. One of them is candidate feedback summary, which takes up a few lines. There’s no reason I can’t be able to look at that entire table without having to scroll, have one column take up a ridiculous width, or needing to click into the cells.

A little late, but also for anyone reading over my shoulder…

If your participants are being accessed as a lookup or rollup, you can enable line-wrapping in grid view by changing the field type to rollup (if it’s currently lookup) and use this as the aggregation function:

ARRAYJOIN(values,'\n')

You can also insert a hard return in the output of a formula field:

{Text1}&'\n'&{Text2}

Airtable will interpret the newline character in a formula or rollup field as a hard line break in grid views with a row height of 'Medium' or larger and the Page Designer Block. You can also copy the contents of a formula field containing newlines and paste them into a long text field, which will result in a multiline display in gallery or kanban views that wraps at newline.

In my Black Mirror and Win/Loss demo bases, I use this technique to create wrapping fields as input for the Page Designer Block. Alternatively, if you have a multi-entry field in which each entry is of a predictable length, you can often cause an acceptable wrap in a grid view with a multi-line row height by setting the field width appropriately, as shown in my Ingredients demo base.

Note the newline character doesn’t appear in grid cells with row height set to 'Short'; instead, Airtable displays a space. A grid view row height of 'Medium' results in the first two lines of text being displayed; 'Tall'displays four lines, and 'Extra-tall' shows six. (In the case of naturally wrapping — that is, without explicit newlines — linked records fields, the additional padding around links leads to fewer lines being display. 'Medium' still displays two lines, but 'Tall' is limited to three legible lines, 'Extra-tall' to five.)

This. The problem is for the people coming from ms excel. For example we have a new employee that kind of dislikes airtable just because she is not able to see the full text. Being able to check “wrap text” => for auto heigth columns would remove one of the custommer barriers you have @Katherine_Duh

This image explains pretty well the need @Katherine_Duh
Hope this can be added to the mid term roadmap. I tried to play with css to do it from our side but is kind of complicated haha but i’m sure this is a plus for the customers.

Thank you for your time and your awesome product :slightly_smiling_face:

I would like to add my vote for cell wrapping with dynamic row heights and/or column widths. I understand and agree Airtable’s design decisions for their default templates. However, wrapping does offer major benefits for custom views and it needs to be supported. As others mentioned, it really is one of the only few gripes I have with the software that prevents me from confidently selling the software to others.

Also, if wrapping and dynamic height/width does get implemented there should be various options for wrapping. Wrapping should be optional for a whole table, for specific rows or columns or even individual cells, etc.

Similarly moved everything off Airtable because of the lack of wrapped cells. It makes it incredibly difficult to see multi-line text in a table in an efficient way (if one cell is a bit too long, I don’t want the row height feature to make half of my view white space…)

Row height is helpful. It would be very helpful to also be able to wrap text in the column headers.

Hi kinda new to airtable,
Am I understanding that you can not do a hard return within a cell?
Thanks
Diane

Was in google sheets, needed to do some organization of multiline information across several products, to allow myself to see a lot of information at a glance.

“Let’s try Airtable” I’ve heard good things, that it’s a lot more flexible than sheets. Sign up, create a table, enter some multi-line information. Try to find “wrap text” or “variable row height”, can’t find it. Google it, get led here… “What? I can’t do that? Only short/medium/tall/extra tall? And it applies to every cell?”

Back to sheets. Literally turned away a new user within 10 minutes.

My gut says that whoever told you that Airtable is “a lot more flexible than sheets” forgot to mention that Airtable is a database, not a spreadsheet. Is it more flexible? In some ways, yes, but because it’s a database, it’s also very different at its core, so some spreadsheet-standard features just don’t exist.

It’s unfortunate that you were given the wrong expectation, but I hope that you’ll take the time to learn more about Airtable, find those areas where it really shines, and be able to use those to your advantage.

A perfect response. There are use cases I would never use Sheets for that are perfect for Airtable, and vice versa. The products simply do different things.

While I think it would nice to have a “full height” option in addition to the small, medium, tall, extra tall options, I recognize that no other database solution I’ve used displays rows at full height.

I just did the same thing - Google led me here. Was coming in from Notion, where this is an absolute core functionality. Hardly would say that Airtable shouldn’t have this as it’s a db, not a spreadsheet, as @Justin_Barrett is suggesting. I see this more as a UI drawback. Don’t really know why you shouldn’t be able to elegantly wrap columns in Airtable, other than they just haven’t implemented it…

I too really am held back by this. And was here due to years of considering AirTable and thinking that today with the big news I might be able to finally jump in…

In fact both Notion and Coda do this…with today’s huge release clearly those two are in the crosshairs, yet they have AirTable beat in this regard. Again disappointed to see this is a fundamental feature of AirTable that doesn’t exist yet, any insight out there as to whether they have it on the roadmap? Makes such a difference when viewing data that gets otherwise cut off.

I will try to work past this as I’ve been waiting so long on the ability to connect bases to each other!

I’m pretty sure what both Justin and I were getting at is “X has it therefore Airtable should too” becomes less compelling the more dissimilar X is to Airtable (spreadsheets like Sheets vs wikis like Coda vs wiki-database hybrids like Notion vs databases). Further, Justin was specifically responding to the very vague claim that “Airtable is more flexible than Sheets”, not the general topic at large. I know I for one was thinking of “literally-just-a-database” platforms like phpMyAdmin or Access when I said “database solution I’ve used”. Neither of us was suggesting that “Airtable makes databases therefore it should never ever wrap column titles”.

Ok, well I am a prospective client with a start up, and bottom line is I was also drawn to this post via Google when I was running through my test account and looking at the awkward way long text strings don’t wrap, so I looked up “AirTable wrap text” in google and was directed to that particular post, not even this thread in general. And I had the same reaction when I realized that AirTable doesn’t do this, but Coda and Notion can.

There is no question that Airtable and Coda and Notion are the three “big boys” in the same market right now, all with huge rounds and huge followings and vying unquestionably for a slice of enterprise customers to make their valuations work. Comparing AirTable to Access is not really what this is about. I am sure @S-M is like me and looking to improve process run in older tools like Sheets or Excel, and now comparing these three tools, possibly some others. For all the hoopla of today’s funding, you have here 2 users who would like simple text wrapping, that Coda and Notion do hands down. To have the Airtable community bark at you for bringing up what the Product Managers at AirTable should be trying to get done is just another turn off…

I hope you didn’t take my reply as a bark. I was just trying to explain that 1.5 years ago when I made the comment you quoted, I was comparing (in my head) Airtable to Access, not services like Coda.

Is there any ‘auto row height’ option? The row height is responsive based on how many lines inside of the cell?

Welcome to the community, @FF_2020! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Row height is currently only a manual setting. On a side note, your question appears to be off of the original thread topic. There are other threads where row height is discussed that would have been a better place for this question.

Hi!
Is there any solution for the same problem in kanban view? This blocks me to moving from Notion to Airtable.
Regards,

Welcome to the community, @Alejandro_Marco! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: Unfortunately there aren’t controls for the kanban view to drive the height of selected fields.

I wonder why the developers ignore this problem?

Yeah, it’s surprising that this hasn’t been addressed over the years. Having a UI that allows people to read the contents of the page is a fundamental ux best practice and should be expected at the bare minimum.

Open and clicking details for record sometimes is okay, but when you tag longer answers it’s very painful to do it every single time. Especially if you have more than 10 records to tag!