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Feb 06, 2018 09:01 AM
I imagine this is pretty common, but haven’t figured this one out yet as I’m struggling a bit with understanding exactly how the CONCATENATE feature works.
I have a flow that regularly exports data from an accounting application into Airtable. The info always exports fields seperately as:
I want to combine it into something a bit easier to display on the page designer. I’d like it to look very similar to how a long text would look where I can insert line breaks, and in the event Ship Line 3 and 4 are not present, omit them to eliminate unnecessary spacing.
Desired look:
Ship Line 1
Ship Line 2
Ship Line 3 (if present), Ship Line 4 (if present)
City, State ZIP Country
Any ideas?
Feb 07, 2018 03:39 AM
You’re in luck: In the Page Designer Block, newline
characters ('\n'
) are read as a CR/LF
(or <br>
) equivalent, which makes assembling this a snap:
{Ship Line 1}&'\n'&
{Ship Line 2}&'\n'&
IF(
{Ship Line 3}!='',
{Ship Line 3}&'\n',
''
)&
IF(
{Ship Line 4}!='',
{Ship Line 4}&'\n',
''
)&
{City}&', '&
{State}&' '&
{Postal Code}&' '&
{Country}
To make things prettier and easier to read, you might want to substitute wider fixed spaces between, say, {State}
and {Postal Code}
or {Postal Code}
and {Country}
. Personally, I prefer an en space
(U+2002
) for the first and an em space
(U+2003
) for the latter:
Bigcityname, ST PCODE Country
Bigcityname, ST PCODE Country
edit: except I can’t demonstrate what that would look like because the forum software, upon save, rewrites en
and em
spaces into normal space characters. Oh, wait — let me do it this way:
Feb 07, 2018 04:59 AM
Awesome! This worked well. Thanks Vann. Does anyone know if page designer can do multiple pages if theres too much information?
Jun 17, 2018 04:02 PM
How can this work inside a table (not in Blocks)?
Jun 18, 2018 06:58 AM
In grid view, Airtable will break at a newline character if rowheight is set to something other than ‘short.’ As I recall, a row height of ‘extra tall’ will display up to six lines — but don’t quote me.
Note this works for both single-line and long text fields.
In gallery and kanban views, Airtable will display the first four lines of a long text field. Since text fields resulting from a formula are assumed to be single-line, you can’t take advantage of these routines unless you copy the resulting value and paste it into a long text field. If you choose to go that route, you can perform that copy/paste manually or through such middleware as Zapier or Integromat. The [Documentation]
table in my Wardrobe Manager base contains a guide showing step-by-step instructions for defining a Zap to copy from a single-line to a long text field. This is considered a two-step Zap and can be run from a free Zapier account. (It should be possible to do the same thing with Integromat — presumably with a higher per-month transaction budget, as well — but I’ve not yet defined and published such a solution.)
@Scott_Lusignan No doubt you’ve discovered this already, but for those reading over your shoulder, the last I checked, the Page Designer Block did not support dynamically increasing text areas allowing it to spill over to additional pages. I’ve not attempted this myself, but @Filipa_Didier reports one can ‘body-check’ the Block into delivering multi-page reports by choosing a custom page size and setting it for multiples of the full-page height. No doubt it also requires painstaking tweaking of the Block layout and one’s printer to ensure print elements don’t overlap pages edges and the like — but if we weren’t up for a challenge, we’d all be using Filemaker, right?¹