Adding a Tab to a String of Data

[NSnyder]

Hello - I’m trying to combine and format data in order to use in a report…would like to separate with tabs if possible to get the spacing and format to look nice and consistent. (Spaces are not working out correctly if record data doesn’t have the exact number of characters.) I’m trying to doing something like the following, but can’t seem to find anything that produces a tab. I’ve tried “\t” and “ALT+09”. Any suggestions?

{Data 1} + TAB + {Data2}

[Justin_Barrett]

Welcome to the community, @NSnyder! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: As you’ve seen, the \t escape code doesn’t work, and I’m not aware of any other method of adding a tab. That said, I wouldn’t recommend adding it in a formula field anyway, even if it were possible. Formulas really aren’t meant for formatting final output. Where are you building your report? In Page Designer? In another tool (via integration)? There’s probably a better way to get what you want, but it will depend on your end goal.

[NSnyder]

Hi Justin - Thanks for your response! The application is a custom quoting system that shows certain line-items based on checkbox selection when choosing various potential configurations to show (up to 9 possible). The report is built in page designer. Those formulas are basically part of a work-around since I wasn’t able to figure out how to structure a report sub-section based on checkboxes being checked or unchecked. All is working, problem is some of the columns will be a little off-center if, say, some numbers are 4 characters long, others are 5 or 6.

[kuovonne]

You can copy/paste an actual tab character into the formula. For example, type a tab in an text editor or word processing app. Microsoft Word has a setting where you can make white space characters like tabs visible. The tab should show up as a tab in Page Designer, although you have no control over how wide the tab is in Page Designer.

[NSnyder]

Thanks for the tip - I copied a tab in from Microsoft Word with success. I just had to play around with how many tabs to paste in a row to get the proper spacing I needed for columns. This, in combination with the techniques used in W-Vann_Hall’s ‘Pretty-Print’ Routines post, allowed me to obtain a nice solution to my issue!