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Status Shipped
Categories Reports
Created by John Gartner-Baca
Created on Jan 9, 2020

Include formatting tags when exporting a List report to a CSV file for later import

We originally set up Aha! with a custom field called "Summary" and later made the decision that it was redundant with the "Description" field and so wanted to remove it.  Before doing that, we wanted to transfer any data from the existing Summary fields to the Description fields.  The only bulk method to do that currently is to run a List report, export to a CSV file, update the data we want to change outside of Aha!, and then import the modified CSV file.

When we did this we lost all formatting (bold, line breaks, etc.) that was previously present in the Summary field.  The Aha! support article regarding Importing from CSV files does review how to manually add formatting tags to CSV files to maintain the formatting, however that is viable to do manually for a few issues but when dealing with hundreds it doesn't scale very well in terms of effort.  

While CSV files don't support the actual formatting, what would greatly improve the user experience is to add functionality to Aha! so that when a List report is exported to a CSV file, if Aha! recognizes formatting in a text field, that it would include the appropriate tags in the CSV file data.  For example if a had a Description value of SAMPLE TEXT in bold, if I exported to a CSV file that would appear as SAMPLE TEXT.   I would think this could be a useful feature to improve the end-user experience and could apply to any case where a user decides that they have been populating data in one text field but would later like to move data to another text field.

  • ADMIN RESPONSE
    Sep 21, 2021

    All rich text fields in Aha! can now be exported with their formatted text. This is done by adding the (rich text) column to your report. Then when you export, the column will contain html to reflect your formatting. If you then import that data back into Aha!, the text formatting will be retained.

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