Table formatting in calculation field

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Jasha

• December 29, 2019 23:43

Hello,

I currently have tables and process instructions for my employees documents as items within an app called "Processes"

The table is formatted as markdown in a text field within the "Processes" item. Below is the current table with all formatting

Status | Explanation |
:--- |:--- |
**Planning** | We are figuring out what would be involved with the task.
**Production** | The listed specialist is responsible for completing a task
**Internal Delivery** | The specialist has completed the task and has passed it to the AM to review
**External Delivery** | We are waiting on the client to get back to us
**Live Campaign** | The ads are running, and we need to monitor things closely.
**Complete** | All Done!

These processes are then displayed in a "deliverables" item as a calculation

@All of Process Instructions Field.toString()

The issue I have is that the table isn't displayed that nicely. The status column is made quite short which causes a line break. The explanation column contains text of varying lengths, so the overall result looks like a dogs breakfast.

Is there a way this could be formatted to be easier to read?

I would like to stay with this current setup, as making any structural changes would be extremely time consuming...

Thanks for your help!

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  Rainer Grabowski

  • December 30, 2019 16:00

  Hi Jasha, 

  the tables in calculation fields are not responsive - means: if the screen resolution is too low and/or the browser zoom too high the lines don't fit. Even having the comment pane expanded shrinks the table width and can lead to ugly line breaks. For me your table fits perfect, there's not too much text in one line. My browser zoom setting is 100% , my screen resolution 1920x1080 (native setting) and font size is medium. 
  
  Markdown tables are sometimes hard to format nicely, you don't have many options. For some things you need to know some tricks or you need some elaborated code (e.g. for line breaks in a column). 

  Rainer

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  Carson Young - Red Cliff Labs

  • December 30, 2019 16:06

  My experience is that anytime you use tables with significant amounts of text it does get hard to format them in a 'pretty' way using the available fields. 

  Based on your comment for really hoping to stay with your current setup as much as possible my initial idea would simply be to try adding additional horizontal line dividers to separate each section.

  You already have :--- |:--- | used to create a horizontal line between the table title row...have you tried using that to add visual separation between each row of your table?

   

  Side Note - I would be concerned having all of these important notes contained in a single multi-line text field that multiple people can edit. Too plausible for someone to misunderstand the markdown settings and edit/delete things in that text field that mess it up for everyone involved. 

  As you already choose to change the formatting and display it into a calculated field, I would far prefer to have each of your processes as individual text fields, and then combine those all into a calculation field with the full summary displayed in a table. 

  This way people can more easily edit only the field they are responsible to update, and avoid having the markdown syntax in the combined text field. - just a thought.

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