Formula to check if the description field (rich text) is empty or not?

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1

I have been trying to figure out the formula to check if the description(rich text) is empty or not. So, a little help would be very helpful.
Thanks.

2

Should be as simple as IsEmpty(Description) which returns a boolean value. If you want a text returned based on true/false, you can do If(IsEmpty(Description), "No text", "There is text").

3

Thank you for your reply.
I have tried them but somehow it returns the same value for everything.
Even if I don’t have anything in the description field, it returns non-empty.

4

It may be that the formula evaluation is slow. It was slow for me yesterday, where it took between 3 minutes to 15 minutes for it to update. Try to leave it for up that time, it should work. Hopefully they get around to fixing performance issue with it soon :slight_smile:

EDIT: I did some additional checks to verify and found that the Description is counted as a Document rather than text, so it may actually have a different behaviour. I also did some inverted tests that indicate evaluation is no longer slow and gave unexpected results.

This leads me to believe that either certain evaluations are slow, or this is a bug. It may be the latter, depending on how it check what constitutes as empty.

If it’s still incorrect 15 minutes from now, I think it’s safe to assume it is a bug, and I’d suggest making a bug report.

5

Yes, I think it’s a bug or the feature has not yet been implemented.

I have reported it here

Thank you

6

Hi, guys!
Thanks for pointing that problem :slight_smile:

That is not a bug in fact - it is an undeveloped feature.
Currently, our formulas (any of it) doesn’t support the Rich Text field (ex: description).
So, what we have in plans (no eta for now, unfortunately)

  • Check if the Rich Text Field is empty or not
  • Count the number of characters in the Rich Text Field
  • Count the number of words in the Rich Text Field

If you have any other suggestions with use cases - will be glad to update our backlog :hugs:

7

Hi Polina,
Thank you for clarifying it.

An additional suggestion I would like to add is support for the checklist.

  • If an unticked checklist exists?
  • If a ticked checklist exists?

This way if we can have some sort of subtask indicator like in the image attached below.

  • Here, the green check emoji is shown when all the checkboxes are ticked
  • The empty emoji if there are checkboxes with unticked items.
  • And if there is no checkbox, the indicator is empty.

To take it further, the indicator can be used to filter and sort things.

Capture
Capture632×513 10.7 KB

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8

Looks pretty cool, thanks, got it!

1 Like
9

If you come across this post only to find out that IsEmpty(Description) does not work, please vote and voice your need here: