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I am faced with little headache:

enter image description here

I have a modal dialog (~500-800px) that can have this one huge column. To top things off the text can be unlimited.

Some ideas that I thought of are

  • adding an icon and proving the text on popover
  • adding this column as a new line inside each line below the rest of the cells
  • adding ellipsis (and giving the full text on rollover in a tooltip or popover).

Any input is greatly appreciated, thanks!

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    It really depends on your use-case - what does your user want with this huge text? Does he read it? Does he just sometimes want to know it is there? Does he need to copy it to use in another program? How often will the text be used in which way? - If you answer this you can find a good way to present it.
    – Falco
    Commented Sep 25, 2017 at 16:14
  • Good questions! This is a field from another modal where the user fills in the reason why he has done this action (add/remove item) and it should appear on this table as a log. This field needs to be visible at all times when the user access this table. It doesn't need to be copied elsewhere. Hmm, honestly although I did answer those questions, I cannot say still what the best solution would be...
    – Xander
    Commented Sep 26, 2017 at 6:16
  • Ok. I think the requirement "visible at all times" is the problem. What is the important information - does every user completely read every 2000 letter log entry for every row when they scroll through the table? Or do they mostly just need the information that there actually is a log entry? Or do they need to know roughly the length of the entry? Maybe you can extract important information out of the entry like tags...
    – Falco
    Commented Sep 26, 2017 at 6:31
  • Thanks for the reply. The specs for the table are a bit hazy so going mostly by gut feeling. I assume the user will "sometimes" read the field in case it's required. The rest of the info is more important for each line. Big chance that this cell will be empty on most lines but also that there can be thousands of lines. Unfortunately tags are irrelevant in this case. As for the length, it's unimportant also.
    – Xander
    Commented Sep 26, 2017 at 7:03

1 Answer 1

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After clarification in the comments the use-case seems to be, that the cell is mostly empty and sometimes filled with an arbitrary amount of information, which is sometimes relevant, sometimes not.

You could display short entries inline and big entries with an ellipsis and a button to show the whole entry in a popup dialog.

Table with ellipsis and buttons

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  • Thanks for your answer. I ended up with something similar.
    – Xander
    Commented Sep 26, 2017 at 11:23

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