Hi everyone!
Recently I’ve been working a lot with Exported Fields format in excel, the kind of excel / CSV file that you download when exporting fields form form settings, and that you can copy paste to create a bunch of new fields.
To me it seems the most important tool for advanced users. Many colleagues of the more advanced side of the spectrum are using almost exclusively this feature to build new forms, since they find it faster than the base UI (and I agree with them, although you have to be a bit nerdy to understand what’s going on). I also find it the only way in which I can connect activityInfo with strong AI workflows, to make Claude / chatGPT check if a form is compliant with donor standards, international guidelines etc…
This post is ment to point out a couple of not ideal stuff that I find in my workflow. Maybe this list can be considered a bug list, or a lacking features list, depending on how you read it… Also, if other users want to contribute with possible use cases, bugs and feature requests, I believe it’s for the best of everyone
- from the web UI FieldDescription allows for multiple lines. It’s like a narrative, and it’s really useful sometime (you may want to write a bullet point or something of that kind. The issue arises when I export fields with a new line in the description. The new line is also in the csv file as a new line, and not as a /n, or something of that kind. When this happens it’ always a bit a mess, you have to fix it manually..
- same as above happens when I’m uploading copy pasting from excel. If I have a newline inside a cell, ActivityInfo does not interpret the new line correctly as a new line inside the narrative description, but sees it as a newline in the csv file, so it gives an error. The only way is to manually insert newlines in the UI (not really ideal)
- There’s no way of formatting the descriptions.
The three point above can be solved allowing AInfo to interpret “/n” as a new line, and the usual “*” for italics “**” for bold etc…
- When I use the lookup fields for a reference form, I always loose that info when I export the data, so we need to manually ad it back using the UI.
Maybe a new column in the fields format for lookup fields can be introduced. I’m not sure how it may work, but you guys are way smarter than I am xD
It’s already a lot, I’m curious to know if this is something also other users had encountered as an issue, or if the AInfo team is already aware of these issues.
Thanks for reading!