It would be helpful to be able to wrap text within a Formula, Single Line Text or a Long Text field if the column width on view is too small. (Rather than truncate the text)
+9Katherine_Duh wrote:
One workaround that might help you for the time being is to select the cell you’re interested in, then press Shift+Spacebar to open an expanded cell dialog. Then you can use arrow up/down keys to switch which row is selected and see all the text in the cell for that row.
The lack of wrapping text is an intentional design decision: to allow wrapping text, we would need to support variable row heights. Our rows are a consistent height in order to avoid the bloated mega-rows that you often find in spreadsheets. Generally, we believe that that table/grid view should be a good overview of a number of different records, whereas the expanded record view gives you the details.
Based on the amount of user feedback on this point, we may offer the ability to change the row height at some point. Alternatively, we might look into a non-grid view that shows each record as a card rather than a row, and this “card view” might support multiline text in a way that would enable you to fit more text information on a single card without having to expand it.
Out of curiosity, how would wrapping text fit into your personal workflow? Do you like to scroll down the table row by row in order to view the content? How many lines of text do you need to be visible—just a couple of lines, whole paragraphs, or multiple paragraphs? Do you need to scan through/read multiple cells at a time, or do you just need to quickly find an appropriate cell of interest and read it, without going to the trouble of expanding it?
I am in full support of variable row height as an option and I feel that an extremely useful and standard functionality like this should not be kept from Airtable Customers just to prevent user-error (on a manual choice, no less). I’ve set up up an infrastructure that adds lines for each item of an order, and it’s a smidgen of what it could be because A. There’s an incredible amount of wasted space here and B. If the amount of items exceeds 6 then my team will have to click and expand at least 5 cells, which is just unnecessary. A variable row height option would instantly make this setup buttery smooth and really nice on the eyes to look at and process.
The expanded record view does not help present this data at all, really. It’s a lot of stuff going on, and the expanded record view requires scrolling and occurs in a smaller vertical space.
Through my searches on the forums, it’s clear to me that people really want the dynamic row height feature. Even if we have to go into a hidden menu and unlock this feature, so as to keep people from unintentionally bloating their databases with it, I think a whole lot of Airtable Customers will be very happy.
+12I am trying to embed content into a public website.
Each embed will contain many records records (anywhere from 1 to 20), so users will need to scroll down to find the one they’re looking for. We do not ALSO want users to have to pop out a record or scroll through the information. The tallest cell option is not tall enough.
Additionally, formulas do not seem to be supported in the gallery view that supports multiline text, and the data is combined from many fields across many tables.
There does not seem to be an easy option to avoid truncation of the text, rendering the embed less than user friendly.
+20Lauren_Briskin1 wrote:
I am trying to embed content into a public website.
Each embed will contain many records records (anywhere from 1 to 20), so users will need to scroll down to find the one they’re looking for. We do not ALSO want users to have to pop out a record or scroll through the information. The tallest cell option is not tall enough.
Additionally, formulas do not seem to be supported in the gallery view that supports multiline text, and the data is combined from many fields across many tables.
There does not seem to be an easy option to avoid truncation of the text, rendering the embed less than user friendly.
To be clear, formulas are supported in all views. If you need to add line breaks to a formula’s output, insert the \n escape code into your string whenever you want a line break. For example:
To insert line breaks between the retrieved values from other fields, do something like this:
{Field 1} & "\n" & {Field 2} & "\n" & {Field 3}
That being said, there’s still no way to control how the cards in a gallery view appear in terms of the available space for fields containing long text, whether they’re formulas or normal long text fields. You might need to look into tools like Softr that allow you to display Airtable data in a more web-friendly fashion.
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+5The lack of wrapping text is an intentional design decision: to allow wrapping text, we would need to support variable row heights. Our rows are a consistent height in order to avoid the bloated mega-rows that you often find in spreadsheets. Generally, we believe that that table/grid view should be a good overview of a number of different records, whereas the expanded record view gives you the details.
Interesting philosophy. Fails in practice. I think I want this to work like Filemaker Pro! Perhaps I just need to convince my company to switch to Filemaker Pro.
+4Adding my support that text-wrapping is an absolutely CRITICAL feature of data tables. Without it, I simply can't transition my project management to AirTable. Airtable has some great features, but I can't forfeit my ability to view all the data at a glance.
It's THAT critical, and such a simple concept I can't understand why they haven't implemented it.
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