I suggest the capability to designate a Text/Formula field in a DB as the “Hint” field for the DB. The hint field’s contents would be displayed in a hint balloon whenever the entity name or link is hovered-over, in any view (e.g. in a relation cell in a Table).
Use case: I create “Icon” Formula fields everywhere, as a way to represent an entity’s type or status graphically. It would be awesome if hovering over one of these fields for example could show a popup hint describing the icon’s meaning:
In the case where no hint is defined for an entity, the entity’s full Name field could be displayed as the hint (there are many situations, such as relations in a Table View, where the entity’s full name may be too long to be displayed in full).
Are you suggesting that the hint would ideally be definable per entity?
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Why? I think per-Database field. If you know outcome you can describe it in this hint.
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Ideally the hint content could be customized for what exactly is hovered-over.
To be truly flexible that would require the possibility to define a separate hint (Formula) for every field in a DB. Or else a Formula that can tell which field is being hovered over, and its value.
I agree that there would ideally be a hint for every field, as well as a hint for the database.
But if you’re suggesting using text fields as holders for hints, this implies that you need 2n+1 fields to support n functional fields 
And I don’t think it is likely that users want the hint to vary by entity within the same database.
Maybe I misunderstood what you meant by
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You didn’t misunderstand – I just hadn’t thought through all the ways this might work.
I agree that defining a new, separate field for (potentially) every existing field in a DB is unwieldy.
The first level is just the ability to have a static description for every field (e.g. “Date person registered - Leave blank if unknown”, or a table with explanations of each Single Select value).
It would also be interesting to also be able to customize a field’s Hint according to its current content, which would mean a Formula instead of static text for the field’s Hint.
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