Limit Characters in Long Text Field

[SUSAN_SHELDON]

Hello! First time user of Airtable, so bear with me:grinning:

I have a Long text field that I am trying to limit the number of characters entered into it. From reading the the posts, it looks like that is not possible, correct?

In another members post they suggested using LEN and COUNT, but I’m not sure how to implement it. From what I’ve figured out so far is that I would need to create another field (a formula field) to count the number of characters (including spaces) from another field in the same record. So, let’s say my long text field was named Product Description. What would be the formula entered (in the new formula field) to do a count of characters? Also, would the character count show in the new field and change as I’m typing in the product description field?

Or if there’s another way…

Thanks!

Sue

[SUSAN_SHELDON]

Well, that was pretty simple. I just needed to add LEN(Description) to the formula. Thought it was going to be some complex formula and started there and it worked.

Problem is, that field does not show in Form View because I guess the software doesn’t allow formula cells to show in form view. I don’t really care for the Expanded view because:

It doesn’t let you add new records as you move along (you have to go back to grid view) and I hate the distracting sidebar of revisions. Is there anyway to toggle revisions off?

Any other work arounds to get that result to show in form view?

[Julian_Kirkness]

Hi @SUSAN_SHELDON

You can turn Revision History display off for any base - this leaves the side bar clear for comments only which make commenting much more usable as well. Here’s a link to the support article about this:

Airtable - Support

Record-level revision history overview

Record-level revision history is an overview of the changes made to each record over time. You can see the record-level revision history inside each record's activity feed when a record is expanded...

[SUSAN_SHELDON]

Thanks @Julian_Kirkness. I did figure that out from another search. Was hoping to hide that sidebar totally as it’s just empty since I’m the only one using the database. My preference would be to be able to see the formula columns in Form View, so I could just keep tabbing through and adding new records.

[Moe]

If you would like to enforce a character limit in your form, we have built a third-party form for Airtable that supports this feature for single line and long text fields.

miniExtensions

miniExtensions Form to Edit and Create Airtable Records

Send someone a form URL that updates a specific record in Airtable. A form for Airtable that's packed with plenty extra features!