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!

[Partyborn]

I’d love to see an edit mode in markdown, or view/export the text as markdown, so we can use it later on.

[Rebecca_Elam]

Airtable

Marked Preview - Apps - Airtable Marketplace

Preview HTML or Markdown in your base on Airtable with the Marked Preview app.

[JoeMarta]

Please add Markdown export capability when you download the CSV from a View. Right now the only way to extract the Markdown is via the API.

[J_W1]

More advanced text handling would be great to prioritize indeed:

• import rich text with csv import
• inline images in text fields
• build-in html>rich text converting engine (maybe via a formula similar to URLencode)
• custom variables like {{firstName}} in text fields based on other fields in the table.
• spintax in text fields, possibly in conjunction with custom variables.

Last ones can be achieved by a formula field already, but would more user friendly when available from within a rich text field.