Kanban Cards Need To Be More Compact

[Dan_Kang1]

I am trying to convert from Asana to Airtable using Kanban cards. But the Kanban cards, even with the recent improvements hiding fields if they are empty, are still too chunky. Using a non Kanban view on Asana. I can see 15 tasks without having to scroll down, and their Kanban view will show around 5 tasks. But with Airtable, the cards are so huge, I can only see 2 or 3 cards before I have to scroll down.

If there was an option on each card to show a compact view or a standard view, it would greatly improve the usability of Kanban cards with airtable.

The compact view only needs to show the title, and if you want to see more of the card you can toggle the standard view.

This would greatly increase the usability and help me move everything off of Asana.

[Terry_Pearce]

+1 to Kanban titles need to have the functionality to be more than one line, or smaller text size. It’s pretty unusable at the moment. I would rather use a grouped grid view than have a very short limit on kanban titles, so effectively I dont’ have a Kanban view available to me on Airtable right now.

Which in turn makes me curious about the competitors people are mentioning in this thread…

[Jean-Philippe_A]

EDIT

I just saw the post from Heracles which has a better loking solution than mine, but I’ll leave it up if someone is looking for the simplest fix.

END EDIT

I’ve struggled with this issue trying to use the Kanban board - also coming over from Trello.

I wanted to increase the width of columns using CSS, but they’re all absolutely positioned with JS, making it impossible to edit with CSS only. I tried modifying the positions with JS, but the order of the elements in the DOM isn’t the same as the one shown, which makes it a nightmare to do, and I don’t have more time to put on this.

I settled on an easy CSS adjustment that simply lets the titles wrap. It’s not perfect and it makes some card paddings a bit wonky, but it works to show more title information.

For those that would like to add the custom CSS with an extension (I use Amino), here it is:

.huge {
    font-size: .9rem;
}

.px2 {
    padding-left: 0.3rem;
    padding-right: 0.1rem;
}

.truncate {
    white-space: normal !important;
    text-overflow: unset !important;
}

[itoldusoandso]

This post is related - Gallery view also needs customization options … e.g. hiding field names.

[Hide field names in Gallery View - #5 by ScottWorld]

+1 for allowing to show multiple lines for any field (e.g. I have a Formula field and the output shows only one line.)

Also - have seen many people to use concatenated text fields using formula (myself included). The concatenated fields are formed so that the text shows in the cell nicely (e.g. the field width and text is entered so that the multi-line text breaks in the right way and the resulting text shows in the cell the way I want it to show.

In Kanban and Gallery view the text would show as one line string.

I am asking here a lot - because I am sure the answer will be - “well this is a database not a word document”, so that’s fine, but if Airtable Kanban and Gallery view is more configurable, Airtable would be unbeatable.

[Jean-Philippe_A]

A small correction to the CSS so the truncation only applies to cards, and not to views shortcuts.

.huge {
    font-size: .9rem;
}

.px2 {
    padding-left: 0.3rem;
    padding-right: 0.1rem;
}

.galleryCardPrimaryCell.truncate {
    white-space: normal !important;
    text-overflow: unset !important;

}

[Karl_L]

Can we please get some updates on this issue?

[Tom_Camarda]

Is there a particular reason why Airtable doesn’t allow us any control over formatting? As simple as aritable is to do some cool stuff, every single airtable feature has way too much padding making it very hard to create tight views. Just look at tables, forms, kanbans, they all have tons of cell padding.

I would argue that for most data sets, the data itself is self explanatory, showing the field label in a kanban should be optional. We should be able to set the padding on the cells to make cards more compact. I can also see a case for having more than one row of kanban stacks (maybe you can have multiple stacks on the page and when you hover over them, they enlarge so you can scroll through the cards and grab what you need).

[Matthew_Chun]

Trying to move over from Trello and this would be a great quality of life update. k feel Kanban view’s convenience comes from being able to see everything relevant “at a glance”, and we cannot do this if we need to click into cards to see names past a few characters.

[Roland_Garton]

Not having a more configurable/compact kanban cards makes AirTable unusable for planning and brainstorming. A shame…AirTable is my first choice due to its feature set, and could be a great tool planning/brainstorming tool, but I have to use other products for this purpose. I need to see lots of cards at once.

Wilder request, but would be great to set up arbitrary groups on a screen, in circles or squares, and move cards from group to group. This functionality exists in other packages, and I use it, but am frustrated by their lack of supporting & relational data.

[Brian_LWA]

I just want to reiterate the need for compact kanban cards. I’ve been managing my entire sales pipeline via Trello tracking where clients are in the pipeline and moving them through the sales funnel. This is something that a lot of CRMs are missing and I decided to build my own CRM with Airtable because trello doesn’t allow me to leverage the data I can collect by having a full database. That said, I’m being torn between picking between day to day operations of efficiency by being able to see way more information without scrolling on trello OR using airtable to collect the data. The bulkiness of the kanban cards is making it difficult because I need to scroll too much and I’ll likely be moving the pipeline management part of my business to trello for now.

[Tony_Petruzzi]

Can someone tell me a reason why something so simple as changing the height attribute of the kanban cell from 78px to auto is taking so long???