Launched: Rich text formatting for long text fields now live for everyone!

[Katherine_Duh]

New formatting options for long text fields are now available to everyone! That means you’ll be able to use

block quotes

Headers

• ordered lists, unordered lists (bullet points), and checkboxes

bold, italic, strikethrough, and code formatting
and more!

Please note that in order to use the new formatting options, you’ll need to do the following:

1. Open up the field customization menu
2. Select the “Customize field type” option
3. Pick the long text field type (if the field isn’t already long text)
4. Switch on the toggle that says “Enable rich text formatting”
5. Save changes (notice that the field icon changes as well)

There are a couple of interesting new use cases that these new features open up that you might not have expected (for example, did you know that you can now input formatted text in forms?), and you can read more about them in this blog post:

For The Record – 26 Mar 20

4 workflows that take advantage of rich text formatting

Here's four of our favorite use cases for the new formatting options in long text fields.

Thank you to every one of the beta participants for helping move this feature through to completion!

[ScottWorld]

There are some bugs with the markdown feature in these long text fields:

If you type ** or * around your words (for bold & italics), it doesn’t bold or italicize your words.

Most of the other markdown commands work when you type them, but not ** and *.

[Holli_Younger]

Is there a way to edit current text to rich text in a bulk manner?

[kuovonne]

It looks like the Batch Update block currently does not work for rich text fields.
However, you can use the Scripting Block to do bulk edits.

What type of bulk edits do you want to do?

[Holli_Younger]

Thank you, I’m still working on learning the script block. I’d like to change all the records on one table to H3.

[Jen_Owen]

Any reason why my Rich Text formatting isn’t working?
(i.e., Selecting Bold is showing up as ** instead of actually making the text bold.)

Thank you!

[Justin_Barrett]

It’s working fine here. Try restarting your browser (or the app if you’re using the standalone version) and see if it’s still broken.

[Jen_Owen]

I think it might be an integration issue. I’ll check with the other app I’m using. Thanks!

[Rich_Shopmyer]

I just realized that when rich text option is enabled, you cannot use the import CSV block to import/update that field (works if you disabled rich text). I could see why this might be complex to support but would have been good to included that in the release notes (he says leaving open I totally missed that in the update)…

[igl]

If you add inline-images to the rich text field (like i can do on the community board)

I move my company to airtable first thing in the morning.

[Chris_Myers]

The lack of inline images is our main gripe with the whole product too