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tom_gerth
tom_gerth
Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
Mar 5, 2019 5:40 PM UTC
Question

Make Activity Timeline more copy/paste friendly

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.

    9 replies

    puna
    puna
    Helper ⭐️
    Mar 5, 2019 6:14 PM UTC
    +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.

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    justin_majors
    justin_majors
    Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    Mar 5, 2019 7:15 PM UTC
    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,

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      isaac_lin
      isaac_lin
      Contributor ⭐️
      Mar 5, 2019 7:27 PM UTC
      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.

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      nitisha_rathi
      nitisha_rathi
      Expert ⭐️⭐️
      Mar 7, 2019 10:55 AM UTC
      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

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        isaac_lin
        isaac_lin
        Contributor ⭐️
        Mar 7, 2019 3:50 PM UTC
        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

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          tom_gerth
          tom_gerthAuthor
          Gainsight Employee ⭐️⭐️
          Mar 19, 2019 1:35 PM UTC
          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.

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          Enterprise Support Manager, Gainsight
            justin_majors
            justin_majors
            Contributor ⭐️⭐️⭐️
            Mar 25, 2019 12:56 AM UTC
            Any update from @isaac_lin comment?

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            nitisha_rathi
            nitisha_rathi
            Expert ⭐️⭐️
            Apr 24, 2019 9:33 AM UTC
            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

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            nitisha_rathi
            nitisha_rathi
            Expert ⭐️⭐️
            Apr 24, 2019 9:35 AM UTC
            @rakesh Can you please share if we plan to export large files to excel? Thanks!

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