Is there a way to have columns in a text field?

[Paul_G]

Hi - Is there any way of making the text in a text field show as several columns?

The text I'm entering is a medical history - it would be an advantage to have each symptom and main point on a new line, but then to be able to see it all at once I'm having to use a very tall, thin field. It would work a lot better with the layouts if it were a short and wide field, with the field formatted as several columns - a bit like in a word processor you can typically format a text box as having the text in several columns. That way I could see about 20 short lines of info on a field only 5 lines high.

I had thought of having a few different text fields side by side and jumping to the next one after each one is filled, but that causes all sorts of problems if I amend the size of the fields or the size of the font later, plus it's clumsy.

Any suggestions? Or do I just have to put up with the towering thin field? Is it something I could do in FMP10?

[LaRetta]

How are you currently structured? Do you have a Patient table and another table holding the history? We need to know what you currently have (it would help if you could post a zipped, empty clone of your file) and it would help to know the difference between lines of medical history and appointments etc.

In general, if history were properly in a related table, you could place portals across your layout. First portal with 5 rows would be rows 1-5, second portal to its right would be rows 6-10 etc. If the number of history records might be larger than the total number of portals you display and you really needed to see the older entries then you would need to 1) just open a list view to see the older entries or 2) set up your portals to 'shift' by script so, to move to the right, you actually have portal #1 hold records 6-10 instead etc, using a left-right arrow to move.

But for simplicity, why not create a labels layout (5160 uses 3 columns). When you want to see history, just open a new window on this layout (after a GTRR if needed). Again, we don't have enough information to give you more specific answers yet.

[comment]

In addition to what LaRetta said: you could do this by calculation - but the result would be read-only.

[Paul_G]

Sorry for the late response - I hadn't clicked 'subscribe', so didn't realise anyone had replied.

I might have been a bit misleading with the term 'history' - in medical terms, it is what the patient is telling us at the beginning of the consultation, before we start doing tests etc. So it's not a portal back to previous data, it's all new data. (It's historical to the patient, but it's all new stuff for this consultation).

So there's no relational structure or portals involved - it's purely a formatting issue. Each bit of information would ideally be put on a new line for clarity. For example:

Diabetic - diagnosed 2005.

Having trouble seeing the television.

Cataract surgery RE 2001 LE 2003.

Got bifocal glasses in 2007, but didn't like them due to a feeling of dizziness when walking down steps - had a fall and felt they had contributed.

Quite glare sensitive.

(you can tell I'm an optometrist!)

Compare to readability of:

Diabetic - diagnosed 2005. Having trouble seeing the television. Cataract surgery RE 2001 LE 2003. Got bifocal glasses in 2007, but didn't like them due to a feeling of dizziness when walking down steps - had a fall and felt they had contributed. Quite glare sensitive.

Readability is very important when I'm looking back on these fields, so I can make sure I'm addressing all the points that were raised.

You can see that with a long history, putting a return after every bit of info makes it easier to read, but also requires a very tall text field. It would work so much better if I could have a shorter but wide text field instead, broken into several columns - like a newspaper or magazine has.

Portals aren't really an answer - you can see that some entries are longer and carry over several lines. I'd have to make the portal lines several lines high to show them, so that there would be a lot of wasted space on the entries that are only one line.

Frankly, I suspect there isn't an answer to this - I'm looking for formatting in a database that is really the preserve of a word processor, but I thought I'd throw it out there just in case wiser folks than I might know of a trick.