We're building a new app with the "new" form builder for the first time, and seeing an issue with embedded reports. The default column width on the embedded table reports is partially obscuring the data, and although you can manually expand each column, there doesn't seem to be a way to make those column widths stick.
Am I missing something, or is this a deficiency of the new form UI? We have half a dozen apps using the legacy UI with dozens and dozens of embedded tables, and this has never been a problem.
Fwiw, I found the following post describing the same problem on dashboard pages, but this is not a dashboard page. It's happening on the 'main form' within our tables... https://community.quickbase.com/discussions/quickbase-discussions/can-you-set-column-widths-for-reports-in-the-new-dashboard-pages/19595
Thanks in advance for any insight.
Default column widths on embedded reports obscuring data
+7Best answer by MarkShnierYou
The screen shot that you provided was of what are called v2 "New Style" Reports. The development on those reports is frozen now and in fact for new clients to Quickbase those reports are no longer available.
Rather than fix those reports, Quickbase took a step back and completely redesigned the reports from the ground up. The new Report Style is called Grid Reports. They run fast and have adjustable column width where both the developer and the end user have the ability to set column widths. The developer can set the default, but the user can adjust on their own as well, and the system will remember their preference.
The setting for the Report experience is set at the Application level under Application Properties and then
Table report version (Beta). Use new grid reports in this app
A suggestion would be to either copy your app or after hours flip the setting (you can go back and forth without breaking anything), to start to understand the Grid Reports. It will solve the width issue, but for example the way to use Dynamic filters changes.
+24This is a known problem which at EMPOWER they indicated in the Keynote by Harrison that they were putting their best engineers on. The problem seems worse when the number is formatted with a $ sign or as a %. So you can try removing the $ formatting or have a mirror formula field which is used on that report as a plain number which does not have the $ format.
The other trick that sometimes works is to override the column heading like this with underscores
_My_Column_Heading_Words___
Because there are no spaces Quickbase may not wrap that column Heading, and hence it will preserve the width as wide as the adjusted label. But typically you will know the magnitude of the typical numbers in the column so you know how wide the column needs to be even though it won't be dynamic.
Please post back with how these work-a-rounds worked.
+7Thanks for the suggestions, Mark. As you can see from this screenshot, treating the values as simple non-formatted numbers did not help in our case, but the underscores_in_column_name workaround does indeed work. Many thanks for that. (I had tried padding the column names with spaces and hyphens, but neither of those work as you know.)
Great to have a workaround for now, but WOW, that's astonishing that it's been 2 years since the new form builder UI rolled out and this has been broken the entire time. The improvements to the new form builder are welcomed, but embedded tables are far too fundamental of a UI element to have made it to launch in such a non-readable state. Good to hear a solution is in the works.
Thanks again, this crutch will get us by until QB resolves the issue.
+5Has something changed with this situation recently? All of a sudden last week I had a whole bunch of reports that started having issues with Formula - Rich Text fields that have been working fine until now. Complete havok as many users started reporting issues with reports not displaying correctly and either users would fix it and the problem kept returning, or they are one of MANY iPad users that cannot change the field width at all on their end. The only way I have been able to resolve this is by adding underscores.
+7Wow, is this truly still not fixed yet?!? It's been over a year so I just assumed they would gotten around to this by now. I just created a new report today, and to get my column wide enough not to clip the values I once again had to add underscores to the label to pad the column width. Yet the column next to it has a short label and short values and yet is inexplicably wider than it needs to be.
The fact that columns widths don't automatically size properly, or that we STILL have no manual control over them is unbelievable. The underscores look incredibly unprofessional, and I'm floored this hasn't been addressed after all this time. Sure am glad we have all those AI wizards though. /s
@MarkShnier__You Who is this "Harrison" who you said addressed this in a keynote over a year ago? Can we reach out to him and ask him what happened to their "best engineers" that were tasked with this? Were they abducted by aliens or kidnapped by a drug cartel before they were able to crack the apparently unsolvable column width conundrum?
+24If yu are using tyhe V2 New style reports, what I do to force the column width is to do a column override on the report's field name with underscores and no spaces.
+24Can you post a fresh screen shot of the issue. Does this only happen on an iPad? Are you in landscape mode holding the iPad?
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