Formatting Tables in the Description Field

Hi there, Patricia! Great to hear from you :) Would love to learn more about how you currently create burndown charts - do you mean you would like to do this directly in a task description field? What kind of formatting options are you interested in seeing?

Greetings Anastasia:  Thank you for getting back to me.  We are trying to really keep our people working inside of Wrike.  We spend too much time fumbling around to find the right spreadsheet or document.  I decided
to use one of the features in Wrike to discuss our billing burn down at a very high level using the table feature in Wrike.  I would be nice to be able to take advantage of the formatting features to lightly format the table and to highlight specific columns, rows or cells.  It’s not critical, just a nice to have.

Patricia, thank you for clarifying, and for adding this to an existing request in the Product Feedback section! The screenshot is really informative, I appreciate it.

I'm keen to see the ability to format copy in tables too. 
Our needs are much more basic - we just need to be able to bold and highlight copy. 

We would also like to use this feature as a workaround for some complex task management. ex: R/Y/G color status, bolding headers etc.

Any news on this topic?
Do I need to be assigned to a special package to use the "Edit Tables" feature?

We don't need high sophisticated editing tools, it would be very helpful to be able to use the basic editing tools, which are already available...

Thank you for your feedback/update

Hi all, the team is reviewing and researching enhancements to the description area. This includes reviewing all other aspects in Wrike that any changes might affect so right now we have no estimates date on changes. Please continue to vote and add use cases here as it's so valuable to the Product Team at this time 👍

For the product team information, I've just encounter the same need as Brenda Hays above. 

Hi everyone, great news - you can now create a new table or copy a table from any place outside of Wrike and paste it into the description field. Details on how to do it are on our Help Center. Please note that the updated description field is currently being rolled out and not yet available on all accounts. All accounts created before 08/24/18 have the current live editor. Let me know if you have any questions 🙌

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

I would also like basic formatting ability in the tables function. Bold, Colors, Add Cells, Merge Cells, Turn Cells to other colors.We have checklists that our team uses to sign off on artwork. They like the checklists and I am trying to figure out how to turn this paper checklist into some electronic and fillable so we can move away from paper proofing.

I also find the table extremely hard to work with. How do you add rows? Delete rows? Remove the entire table if you want to start over? Or put text above the table after the table is already created. I find that if I insert the table and then decide I want text above the table, I am SOL on using the cursor!

@Amy Hey, thanks for reaching out 🙂 Here's what you can do with the updated table editing:

Bold and colors are available, also you can insert/delete rows and columns using the three-dot menu in the right corner of the cell.

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

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Hello Lisa - The three dots do not pop up for me.Right-clicking does not work either.

Hi Amy, this has been rolled out for accounts created before 08/24/18 so perhaps you have yet to receive it. I'll update you guys here when it's rolled out to all accounts.

As for now, you can use Document Editor to edit MS documents as a solution. This opens the folder in the appropiate app on your computer or cloud system and saves the document once you save the changes. Here's how to install and start trying it out.

Any questions, feel free to ask the Community in the How To forum 🙂

Hi Stephen - any idea on when it will be release to more accounts. We have had our account since 2017 but don't have this feature. 

Hey @Jennifer, I'm jumping in for Stephen here 🙂

The Updated Description Field is planned to be rolled out to all accounts by the end of July 👍

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Looking forward to end of July! Our needs for formatting tables are in demand.

Also, the table always adds an additional column or row. Not sure why this is or if it is a glitch.

@Amy thanks for providing the screenshot, I'll ask about it. Anyway, by the end of July creating and formatting tables will be a lot easier 🙂 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

The new formatting of the table field has started to roll out on new tasks we create, and I cannot begin to say how TERRIBLE it's working for us!! We do a lot of work in Excel, so spreadsheets are our jam, but these tables act more like a word document than a spreadsheet. You can't copy and paste data from Excel and for the data to go into the correct cell, like it used to. Sure, it's nice to add and remove columns and rows, but not at the expense of the sortation capabilities the tables used to have.

Is there any way we can revert back to the old table style? Or are there other updates that are being planned to enhance the user interface for tables?

I believe their intention with tables was for it to be pretty basic. Adding / Deleting rows, simple formatting, like bold and italics.

I see that Wrike removed the glitch that was automatically adding columns to the right and rows going down. But now you can adjust the width of a column unless you type into it. Can you add a manually adjuster like in excell?

I feel the original table functionality was pretty good, and to make it become basic, a lot of useful features were stripped away to make room for the ability to adjust the text fonts. Although this is a nice feature to be able to format the text inside each cell, the ability to press tab to move the cursor across the row, and press enter to move the cursor down was removed. In addition, if I wanted to copy and paste data from an existing Excel spreadsheet to share with the team, I cannot designate where the data is pasted into the table, as it defaults to the very far left columns. My only option is to take the data in the existing table in the task description, copy and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet, update the table there, then copy and paste it back into the task description as a completely new table.

Any chance we can get some of the original features of the tables put back into the current version?

I agree with Kevin on most points. The new fonctionalities are quite interesting, but the fact that we can't copy/paste anymore from the tasks directly in a table outshine any ameliorations. The tables lost their "compatibility features" in profit of design. 

Best regards,

@Kevin @Pierre-Hugues I'm raising Support tickets for you guys to investigate copy-pasting 👍

@Amy For now, it's not planned to add the ability to manually adjust column width. I'll let you know if that changes! 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa How to copy an entire row or entire column and paste it at the end of table either at the bottom or after the last column? Can you add this feature?

Hey SV -, you should be able to copy a row and then paste it - it will be pasted under the row you copied. Will this work for you? 

Lisa Community Team at Wrike Wrike Product Manager Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Wrike Team member Become a Wrike expert with Wrike Discover

Lisa Yes, i can copy it and paste it. But it does not get appended to the already created table, pl see attachment

Hi SV -, thank you for the additional details. In order to delete the space between the rows you can:

1) Choose the option to add a row:

2) Paste the values into the relevant row and delete the one which remains blank:

I hope this is what you were looking for! Please, let me know if you have any additional questions 👍