Column Widths - Columns are very wide

Has anything changed in the latest release which would cause column widths to expand? When working in one of my dashboards, I noticed I now have to scroll to see all of my data in one of my widgets. Prior to the latest release, I am almost certain I was able to view all of the data in my widget without scrolling.

Here is a screenshot showing my column. The column is much wider than needs to be. Is there a way to adjust the width? In this case the column Customer Name is a dimension.
image

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I’m not aware of anything, certainly not seen the same issue.

I wonder if you could drop you customer list into Excel and do a count on the character length of each name.

Could be that a user has done something in the actual ERP system to cause this error?

Hi @Justin,
I agree with you, we have noticed an increase in the widths of columns. Especially the layout on financial statements. Here is an example we have:

This is on a ultra wide monitor and cannot see the numbers when everything is collapsed, which is crazy. We also have the same with grids. Why we are getting a scroll bar here is very strange:
image
Note: This widget on the dashboard has not been touched in months and the data has remained the same, but we now have scroll bars.

When I last raised this, I was told to change the property to “Paragraph” which would truncate the text after a specific length, but still with this its too wide. Also, the grid gets as wide as one of the values in the row, if you scroll down your list, does it have a customer name much longer than the others?

You could in SQL or in the designer create an expression of LTRIM(RTRIM([Customer Name])), which may eliminate the unnecessary spaces, but suspect it wont get rid of all the layout issues.

But back to your initial question, I do believe something happened a couple of releases ago which changed the behaviour of the layouts.

Jon

Hi @JonKemp,
Thanks for the reply. I will try the SQL approach and see if that helps. My users are telling me they can remember being able to see all of the data in a specific widget without having to scroll, but now they have to scroll to see data.

-Justin

Hi @StuartH,

Thanks for the reply. I will give the character count a try, but I honestly do not think it is related to data entry in the ERP. I have been getting emails from my users stating they can remember begin able to view all of the data in a specific widget without scrolling, but now they have to scroll. Some of the columns have become very wide and that is causing the need for scrolling. I do not have a cutsomer name anywhere near the width of the column.

-Justin

I agree,


Some columns are now really wide and I have to hide the dimensions to see all columns on one screen

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What mode have you got the line set to?

Equal Width, Flex, Horizontal Scroll or Stacked

@StuartH most of mine are set to Equal Width or Flex.

I just wondered if it was an issue with Flex?

I’m not having any issues on mine which mostly use Equal Width or Horizontal Scroll.

I find Flex doesn’t convert well when changing screen sizes.

Having no ability to enlarge or reduce column width has always been an issue for me. Continue to hope for the ability to size on a custom basis in future releases.

I’ve noticed some of my columns are doing the same also, like everyone else there is no extra data in the fields they’re just abnormally wide.

Experiencing this in the normal grid now.

Making columns fall off the screen and require horizontal scrolling unnecessarily.

What’s worse is that this is what I get at the end of my report - why does the vertical scroll sit on top of the data?

image

@StuartH,
Oddly enough that gremlin has now gone for me, there is a noticable improvement since the drop of 8.0.6. But still too wide. On the update notes it was there as a bug ref of dev-16248:

.

Out of curiosity, are you a Chrome,IE, Edge, safari user? Have you tried different clients just to see if its a HTML 5 issue?

Using Chrome as there are other bugs with other browsers and Chrome is what Phocas recommend for the best experience.

I actually just began using Phocas for my company, and I am specifically logged in to the forums to recommend something be done about this.

I know that in some similar applications report designers are given the ability to manually adjust column and row heights.

I added an example below, but all the space between the black bar in the ‘Total’ column and the MTD Sales column is unnecessary and only serves to force the end user to scroll right to see all the data presented.

Hopefully some action can be taken to correct this or a new feature can be implemented! Thanks!

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Just to add some additional points to think about at the same time about how similar applications work:

Heading controls

¡
Specify Width or Wrap or Auto (If too long this truncates with dots like this…)

¡
Specify Height or Wrap or Auto

¡
Left/right/center/auto

¡
Background Color

Columns

¡
Specify Width or Auto (If too long this truncates with dots like this…)

¡
Specify Height or Auto

¡
Left/right/center/auto

¡
Background color

Might also have to think hard about matrix tables (Phocas calls them “nested”)

Welcome to PUG @dphelmken, really hoping this is in the scope to get rectified soon, we have a number of widgets we are using in reports that just don’t look great due to this issue.

We are having this issue too, it is making it so we have to scroll horizontally on dashboard widgets when we shouldn’t have to. Would like to see the columns reduce blank space at the end of columns so that if a widget can fit in the flex widgets allotted space without cutting off information and without horizontal scrolling it does.

Edit: This causes us the most heartburn on chrome for iOS.

Hello everyone,

I apologise for any frustration this has been causing you.

Some background: a change in Chrome 75 was causing an issue where the header columns were being misaligned with the main body columns. A CSS fix was performed in our 8.0.3 release. Unfortunately this fix in turn is responsible for unnecessarily large columns such as those you have been seeing.

This has now been fixed in our 8.0.9 release which will be deployed to our Cloud environment later this month.

If you continue to experience any issues around this after that release, please reach out to me.

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Thanks for the feedback Liam, one of the things we like about the PUG is the interaction with the Phocas Team as well as each other as users.