Forum Discussion

DrewWoods's avatar
DrewWoods
Qrew Cadet
7 years ago

How can I get a list of text to display in columns rather than one long list?

We're creating a knowledge base and sometimes we have articles that simply list companies that fall under certain categories.

At the moment, when we copy a list of these companies, they take up the whole screen because it just lists one company on each line, which can be quite long.

I'm wondering if there is a way to make it display in columns. The same way Windows would format your files if you selected list view instead of details.
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  • QuickBaseCoachD's avatar
    QuickBaseCoachD
    Qrew Captain
    7 years ago
    One solution would be to not include the whole text of the knowledge base text on the report. I do have a way to allow that field to still be searched, even though it's not on the report.  That way you could use the filter box to filter the results for a key word and still get hits if the text was in the body of that large field.
    • DrewWoods's avatar
      DrewWoods
      Qrew Cadet
      7 years ago
      Definitely something worth exploring. Would you mind elaborating on your solution?
    • QuickBaseCoachD's avatar
      QuickBaseCoachD
      Qrew Captain
      7 years ago
      Make a formula rich text field called either like [Search target] or a really skinny name such as a dot [.]




       var text URL = [my search target field]; var text Words = "";
       "<a href=" & $URL & ">" & $Words & "</a>"

      add that to a report as say the last column.  If it's labelled as a dot either as the native field name or as a column override field name, no one will even notice that it's there.

      Basically it's a cheat.  For performance reasons Quick Base only searches fields that are on a table report.  So this makes a fake  hyperlink but the only visible words are null - empty quotes. but it's a field on the report so it gets searched.
    • DrewWoods's avatar
      DrewWoods
      Qrew Cadet
      7 years ago
      Thanks. That's great to know.

      We may implement that for another issue we're working on, but we actually figured out another way to do this.


      We went into the source code, and just added CSS inline styles and it worked.

      <div style="column-count:3">Company Name<br />
      Company Name<br />
      Company Name
      <p>&nbsp;</p>
      </div>