Interactive Table

[Alex]

We’re getting ready to launch an updated version of the Table in ActivityInfo that will support in-line editing, filling down cells, copying, pasting and more features you would expect of a spreadsheet.

Despite being a powerful tool, Excel and spreadsheet-based software haven’t been designed to work as databases or hold large amounts of data. Validating data, enforcing rules, collaborative data editing and scaling up to managing and editing long datasets are too challenging tasks for this type of tools due to their underlying mechanics.

On the other hand, the simplicity in which you can copy, move, fill down and work with the data has been considered a unique advantage of their nature. For this reason, we’ve been working on enhancing the data entry options in the platform.

Last month we gave a tour of the new feature in a webinar (watch recording).

You can preview this spreadsheet-based data entry here: https://preview.activityinfo.org
Please note that this version is connected to the production environment so any changes you make will apply to the live data.

Please share your feedback here!

[Jamie]

Hello all,

Thank you for all of your valuable feedback on the inline table over the past few weeks. It is great to see the feature in use and bringing positive changes to your workflows. We have been hard at work responding to this feedback, and I would like to share an update on our progress looking ahead to our production release.

Major bug fix update
This week, we released a major update to the inline table preview including bug fixes for blocker and high priority issues. These fixes are now available in preview build 16 or later. We continue to work on resolving the remaining issues before we go live with our production release. A full table of issues is included below.

Optimisations
Additionally, we have been using anonymized datasets to profile performance of the inline table in real-world forms. From this profiling, we have been working on a set of optimisations to bring the more complex queries of the inline table to an acceptable performance level.

The first batch of these optimisations is complete, and we hope to release these changes to the inline table preview in the coming week.

However, some performance bottlenecks still remain, and we continue to work on additional optimisations to resolve them. Should you find some of your forms are slower than anticipated, please reach out to support@activityinfo.org with the details.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Inline table work: ongoing and released

Issue	Summary	Priority	Status
AI-5501	Attachment files no longer displayed in the record panel	Blocker	Released
AI-5638	Formatting is broken on last edit time column	Blocker	Released
AI-5656	Ensure consistent presentation for non-editable values in cells	Blocker	Released
AI-5657	Parent column values in subforms are not autocompleted when adding new rows in subforms	Blocker	Released
AI-5668	Copy to clipboard modal is crashing when selecting a lot of rows including the record status column	Blocker	Released
AI-5670	Do not evaluate calculated fields in referenced forms if the reference field is blank (e.g. CONCAT() function) in data entry or inline table	Blocker	Released
AI-5690	Field translations are not displayed in the reference dropdown	Blocker	Released
AI-5697	Draft subrecords can be lost via data entry when editing an submitted parent record	Blocker	Released
AI-5700	Calculated fields in subforms set as unique that point to parent or reference fields are crashing inline table display	Blocker	Released
AI-5708	Subform table display crashes due to parent pending serial numbers	Blocker	Released
AI-4759	User has delete permission removed and can no longer resolve invalid subrecords	High	Released
AI-5696	Parent reference fields that point to the subform keys are crashing the inline table display	Blocker	In Progress
AI-5543	Deleting new rows in subforms returns a 400 error and the deletion screen remains on screen	Blocker	Backlog
AI-5495	Print screen for a record with draft values will display only the draft values	Blocker	Backlog
AI-5715	Form table display crashes when there is an invalid reference in the form design	Blocker	Backlog
AI-5552	Submit to server modal is flickering	High	Backlog
AI-5625	Users without view permissions do not see all buttons and details in record panel for their drafted records	High	Backlog
AI-5635	Keyboard cell navigation and editing is not working properly after selecting options in a cell dropdown menu	High	Backlog
AI-5639	Drafting subrecords in subforms with relevance rules is counted as invalid for users without view permissions	High	Backlog
AI-5640	Add rows button is active in subforms for users without the right permissions	High	Backlog
AI-5684	Multi selection is not properly handled when the mouse pointer goes outside the table display	High	Backlog
AI-5709	Wrong error message displayed on subform table when users role contains editing filters or editing conditions	High	Backlog

[Jamie]

Hello all,

I am pleased to announce that this afternoon we released Version 5.0-b18 to the preview service. This release includes significant optimisation work for the inline table to bring it to an acceptable level of performance, as well as a number of other fixes. Your feedback over the last few months and the use of anonymized datasets has been instrumental in tracking down the key performance bottlenecks on the inline table. Thank you again to everyone who has provided feedback.

However, as the new inline table is much more demanding, more work is required to bring the inline table in offline mode to an acceptable level of performance before a general release to production. Over the course of the next few months, we will be focusing our work primarily on improvements to inline table performance in offline mode.

In the meantime, we will also be releasing regular fixes and usability improvements to the inline table. And of course, I will continue to provide regular updates on our progress here.

Thanks once again for your positive support on this development, and your continued engagement and feedback. Should you have any performance issues or experience any bugs in the meantime, please reach out to support@activityinfo.org with the details.

[spont_missioinvest.o]

Hello! Any thoughts on when 5.0 will be going live? Sorry if I missed an announcement. Thank you.

[Alex]

Hi Shirin (and everyone else),

The headline: this morning, we had a meeting to review all open issues and feedback that we’ve received, and have chosen Tuesday, January 13th, 2026 as our go-live date!

Although we are on-track to close all blocking issues by the end of this week, we decided to pick a release date after the December holidays to ensure that everyone has enough time to prepare their users for the change, and that our own team will be at full strength to support the change management process.

We also heard from some of you who were personally very enthusiastic about the new interactive table, but weren’t sure all of your users were ready for it. We heard concerns that novice or occasional users would be more likely to introduce errors or mistakes given how easy the interactive table makes editing.

For this reason, we’re going to be making “interactivity” an opt-in feature to start.

This way, you can turn on “interactive mode” for yourself, or save a default shared view for your team if you want this to be on for everyone by default for specific forms.

We’ll be collecting feedback during the first quarter of next year and may make the interactive default in the future, but hopefully this will give you time to help your users transition at a pace that makes sense for your teams.

The switch will be release to https://preview.activityinfo.org shortly.

And of course, if you want to switch earlier than January 13th, don’t hesistate to switch yourself or your team to the preview version at any time!

I hope this strikes the right balance, but as always, keen for your feedback.

Alex