It would be helpful to be able to wrap text within a Formula, Single Line Text or a Long Text field if the column width on view is too small. (Rather than truncate the text)
I need to clarify. My original request was for viewing. I subsequently found the “Fit to width” under print, which helps when printing, but not viewing. Just trying to be clear.
One workaround that might help you for the time being is to select the cell you’re interested in, then press Shift+Spacebar to open an expanded cell dialog. Then you can use arrow up/down keys to switch which row is selected and see all the text in the cell for that row.
The lack of wrapping text is an intentional design decision: to allow wrapping text, we would need to support variable row heights. Our rows are a consistent height in order to avoid the bloated mega-rows that you often find in spreadsheets. Generally, we believe that that table/grid view should be a good overview of a number of different records, whereas the expanded record view gives you the details.
Based on the amount of user feedback on this point, we may offer the ability to change the row height at some point. Alternatively, we might look into a non-grid view that shows each record as a card rather than a row, and this “card view” might support multiline text in a way that would enable you to fit more text information on a single card without having to expand it.
Out of curiosity, how would wrapping text fit into your personal workflow? Do you like to scroll down the table row by row in order to view the content? How many lines of text do you need to be visible—just a couple of lines, whole paragraphs, or multiple paragraphs? Do you need to scan through/read multiple cells at a time, or do you just need to quickly find an appropriate cell of interest and read it, without going to the trouble of expanding it?
Katherine. Honestly, I think its a matter of our users being so used to XCEL. We are a community theater with one full time employee and 3 part time. Much of the work of running the theater depends on volunteers. Years ago, one volunteer was an astute spreadsheet user. We run the theater almost entirely using spreadsheets they built… Lots of them. So, our staff and volunteers are familiar with how they work. Any change is not insurmountable, but would require training and familiarization of the new way. These are often obstacles to adopting new/different technologies. I suspect you’ve heard this before. It is perhaps a minor matter, but with scroll wheels making scrolling up and down on a spreadsheet to read a wrapped column, it seems like more clicks to scroll to the enlarge button and have to click it to then see the full text. Again, a matter of what you have been using a long time.
I like the design decision to keep things clean by not wrapping text, but I believe that power should be in the hands of the users to decide if they want to wrap text and have variable height rows or not. If it was a feature that could be switched on or off by each user per table (and not affect other users’ view of that table), that would be ideal. I have certain tables where I and others on my team at work would prefer to see more information at a glance, rather than having to expand each record/cell to get at the details.
I would like the column headings to be allowed to wrap - that would be helpful for explanations of what we’re seeing while not necessarily needing to see the full width of the colun
Kelly, you may find adding field descriptions useful—it’ll allow you to add mouseover descriptions to columns so you don’t have to expand the column width.
I like @Kelly_pratt suggestion. Example – I have a buch of date fields that don’t need to be wider than the date itself, but it’s harder to identify the column because the title is truncated.
In my case in it wouldn’t be so much for an explanation but for ID. I’m sorry I can’t your suggestion @Katherine_Duh because a) it requires hover so no good for overview, b) it obscures the next column (again not good for overview), c) it takes a bit to show even on hover so no good for quick ID.
If the column headers could wrap to a second row it could help reduce the width of columns without adding excessively intrusive vertical space. Would be happy if there was such an option vs wrap/nonwrap as standard behavior. Or if we could choose to reduce the heading size? [meant heading font size]
