Searching for a solution to display large blocks of text responses

I have developed a post-implementation survey in Smartsheet. I know there are better tools, but I would like to be able to keep everything accessible for my organization, and not have them jump around to different places to find what they might be looking for.

Many surveys have free form text fields to capture comments, mine has nine. Similar to this:

I have searched through the forums, and haven't seen a solution that would seemed to work, so I attempted to go the Dashboard route.

The fields unfortunately aren't wrapping, which a thought I had found the solution to in the forums: I needed to have the input field be set to wrap.

This was easy enough to do, and it appears in the report I am trying to eventually put on the dashboard:

The first question is: why is it still not appearing as wrapped text on the Dashboard? (See second image in this post.)

The second is: is it possible to remove the highlighted section since I would be putting in "clean" headers for each section, and don't want the column name to appear?

Since all of the fields are optional, I might not have data in each cell., thus exploring using reports to filter each of the text fields. I haven't built out the Dashboard with all nine questions, as maybe I am approaching all of this wrong. I am just looking for a clean way to display the submitted comments. I have used filters for each question/report so that only completed responses are showing, but if I can't get them to show up nicely, then perhaps there isn't a way to present free-form text responses in Smartsheet?

I am fairly new to Smartsheet, and have been able to get almost everything I need, it just seems getting some of the data back out is foreign to me.

There have been many other great responses here, I'm hoping that someone has one for my situation as well.

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Accepted answers

Genevieve P.

Hi @Bill in Ohio

I'm unable to replicate what you're seeing - as long as the Text Wrap is applied to the entire column in the main source sheet, then both the Report and a Report Widget on a Dashboard should display this as text-wrapped, even when I adjust the sizing of the widget:

Is it possible that the text wrap is only applied to a few cells, instead of applied to the entire column? You'll want to ensure that when you click on the column name in the sheet the blue "text wrap" icon is selected:

You are correct the Report widgets will stay the same size that you set them as when you create the widget. If additional content is added, you'll need to scroll within the widget to see it all.

Let me know if adjusting the column helped!

Cheers,
Genevieve

Andrée Starå

@Bill in Ohio

Excellent! Almost there it seems.

Try adding CHAR(10) to insert the return.

Did that work/help?

Bill in Ohio

Thank you @Andrée Starå ! That did indeed work! It looks so much better now.

All comments

Andrée Starå

Hi @Bill in Ohio

I hope you're well and safe!

You should be able to have it wrapped in the Dashboard, if I'm not mistaken, and you can also add filters so the rows you don't want to include don't show.

I'd be happy to take a quick look.

Can you share the sheet(s)/copies of the sheet(s)? (Delete/replace any confidential/sensitive information before sharing) That would make it easier to help. (share too, andree@workbold.com)

Did that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

✅Did my post(s) help or answer your question or solve your problem? Please support the Community by marking it Insightful/Vote Up, Awesome, or/and as the accepted answer. It will make it easier for others to find a solution or help to answer!

Bill in Ohio

Unfortunately, as shown in the attached screenshots, the text wrapping is not carrying over into the dashboard. It just cuts the text off.

I also noticed a different behavior on the dashboards that I'm not too keen on either: when there are more rows (or content) than what the section is set to display, it won't grow to accommodate. You can set the maximum that you want to have visible, but it wont' grow or shrink to size the content.

Genevieve P.

Hi @Bill in Ohio

You are correct the Report widgets will stay the same size that you set them as when you create the widget. If additional content is added, you'll need to scroll within the widget to see it all.

Let me know if adjusting the column helped!

Cheers,
Genevieve

Bill in Ohio

Thank you @Genevieve P. , I think that must have been the trick. I've done and re-done these dashboards so many times trying to get my template setup, that I think for this one I must not have set it.

It's working like expected now!

@Andrée Starå - in order to capture the information I wanted, I created reports, which have the filters applied to the table, but the Dashboard widget is showing the column name from the original table (which shows as the "column header" on the report. I'm thinking of trying to direct that back to table with filters and not using the report.

Bill in Ohio

Update - so I was able to create a non-elegant solution: I created another table which has:

JOIN(COLLECT({GoalComments}, {GoalComments}, >""), " | ")

and repeated this for each of the comment fields. Not exactly what I would have liked, and I'd still love to know how to insert a return character instead of "|" but at least it is something.

Now that it is in a table (sheet) instead of a report I have a little more ability to format it. (Except for the | break between the comments of course!)

Andrée Starå

@Bill in Ohio

Excellent! Almost there it seems.

Try adding CHAR(10) to insert the return.

Did that work/help?

Bill in Ohio

Thank you @Andrée Starå ! That did indeed work! It looks so much better now.

Andrée Starå

@Bill in Ohio

You're more than welcome!

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