Column width bug?

[Sarah_Keown]

Is there a different way to set the column width other than - default/narrow/wide?

I have two apps made up the same way, both set to Wide column width but it appears totally different.

App 1

App 2

[Steve]

There’s no way to strictly control the column widths. The only way to influence them is the settings you mentioned, and by (occasionally) using Save & Verify Data rather than Save when saving app configuration changes in the app editor. One of the extra steps Save & Verify Data does is to analyze your data and resize columns to better suit it. It’s not perfect, but it typically improves the appearance.

[Bahbus]

The two best ways to force column width to be what you want consistently:

1. Use copy-able blank spaces in your column names to pad their length.
   OR
2. Use 3-4 rows of fake data that is specifically the max length of each column you want to display with some sort of easily filterable key (I use a key of "0" and a slice filter of [Key]<>"0"). And then use a slice to filter those fake ones out from the display.

Some people prefer method 1 because it is a little simpler, technically. I prefer method 2, because its little bit less trial and error-y, and this method is less likely to break in the future. The blank space trick only works for certain types of blank spaces, because some of them get counted as regular spaces and consecutive spaces sometimes get trimmed. If the Devs change what gets parsed as a valid space, its possible method 1 fails.

[stuggijo]

Hey Bahus,

I also struggle with the sameissue as Sarah. Working for some months on an app, but the column widths extend sometimes, without me changing something. Especially a couple days ago the grew to a quite wide space. (Unfortunatelly the “save & verify” method, mentioned by Steve, doesn’t return it to the previous narrow space (is already set to “narrow” within the settings.)
I would like to have it reduced to the mininum, just wide enough to be able to read the title of the column (which was possible before).

thanky for the advice. What is a “copy-able blank space”?
Could you make a sample for your second mentioned idea? What do you mean with fake data?

Thx

[Steve]

App creators no longer have any control over column widths.

[stuggijo]

Oh. For a particular reason? Will it stay so or is been working on another solution?

[Steve]

AppSheet apps are getting a material upgrade Feature Release Notes

It is the case now that horizontal scrolling is automatically applied in table views, and the option to disable it is no longer available. This thread gives more context. I can expand a bit on the rationale. Before horizontal scrolling was supported, the view would automatically drop any columns that didn’t fit. This made it hard to predict exactly what data would be visible to whom since different device form factors and orientations would cut off different columns. It also made the views unst…