Make Activity Timeline more copy/paste friendly

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
March 5, 2019
9 replies
248 views

As we know, we often times see exporting issues when data such as notes and descriptions are copy/pasted into Timeline (and several other areas of the product). This happens because when we copy/paste into long text or rich text areas, all of the formatting is carried over, and when we go to export that data, it is exported with a ton of HTML formatting characters which makes the data hard, if not impossible to read.

Wondering if we have any plans to make Timeline exports more format friendly, as often times customer learnn this lesson the hard way and we don't have a very efficient way to clean it up.

Timeline

puna

Helper ⭐️

+1.

We haven't had to export Timeline activity yet, but I foresee doing this soon. As of now, our only workaround is to "paste and match style" (right-click menu). This works, but it also removes any formatting (eg bullets, bold, italics, etc) so we need to go back in and reapply those afterwards.

justin_majors

Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Please consider this enhancement or a workaround for this. We are having issues exporting all activity data and running it through some of our data science models due. Thanks,

isaac_lin

Contributor ⭐️

This is critical functionality for our user group and being able to build meaningful reports and run metrics off of Timeline Activity data.

With Timeline Activities being one of the more highly adopted features in Gainsight, we'd really like to see an expansion of ability to pull from and interact with this data.

nitisha_rathi

Expert ⭐️⭐️

Hi all,

I am assuming that you are facing the formatting issues in csv file. csv is a flat file and has limited capabilities to format the text. That is why we cannot optimize it for timeline text formatting.

Formatting should be honored in excel files.

Please let me know if my assumption is incorrect or if you have any other questions.

Thanks,

Nitisha

isaac_lin

Contributor ⭐️

Hi Nitisha,

That's right. However, the Timeline Data we're trying to export via Report Builder or Bionic Rule is typically a large file with several thousand rows. Is there a way to export as XLSX? I know that for Reports past a certain row count, it exports as CSV instead.

Best,

Isaac

tom_gerthAuthor

Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️

Another caveat to this is that I've now discovered that this formatting is also considered when writing "Notes" to rich text area fields in SFDC or MDA. If the formatting code is included when the notes are coy/pasted, and that coding takes the character count over the limit of the field, the record fails to load.

On top of this, the coding is not shown in the rule failure, which leads to more confusion as to why the record would fail.

Enterprise Support Manager, Gainsight

justin_majors

Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Any update from @isaac_lin comment?

nitisha_rathi

Expert ⭐️⭐️

Hi Tom,

If you are using notes field in rules, then we do not expose rich text field there (but we do maintain basic formatting in the plain text field). Can you share with me a scenario where u faced this problem?

Thanks,

Nitisha

nitisha_rathi

Expert ⭐️⭐️

@rakesh Can you please share if we plan to export large files to excel? Thanks!

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