Allow column widths to be set as a percentage of available space

[#1]

Workfront's reports are supposed to be content aware and auto-size report columns accordingly, however this is rarely ever true or accurate. The below report is a perfect example; there's no reason the Task Name column should be wider than the Project Name column when the project names are longer than task names.

You can use text mode to force the column widths, sure, but there are many problems with this as well. Sometimes a column with very little content will end up larger than the width you chose, and columns with lots of content will get squished into narrow, hard to read columns (despite the text mode telling it otherwise).

Instead of having to manually set the pixels for each column in a report, can we please have the ability to use a percentage of total space available? I believe this would also help users who switch from laptop to desktop/monitors, since reports rarely look the same from screen-to-screen.

If a % of total space isn't an option, please at least improve the "content aware" column sizing, as it is not working the way it should. It's difficult to drive user adoption and expand WF within our organization when our reports look like such a mess.

[#2]

And 18 months later, their "content aware auto-sizing" is still not aware at all! Painful to say the least.

[#3]

Workfront's handling of column widths for views (eg task list views, project list views, issues lists views) is very problematic. I find I have to constantly manually change the width. This very negatively affects my user experience with views. There appear to be a couple of causes

Cause 1) Workfront doesn't do a very good job of automatically setting an appropriate width based on the type of field (eg rich text fields and task/project name fields generally need to be wider than date fields and simple number fields)

Cause 2) Manual adjustments overide the default view settings and text mode settings forever (or at least until the user settings are resest by and admin). This means that even when we set the width using text mode, the setting is lost as soon as the users makes a manual adjustment (something which they are very likely to do at some point)

Cause 3) Manual adjustments to the n-th column width are kept when switching from view to view, ie they are not user and view specific. Thus if the user has manually adjusted the width and if two views have significantly different type of data in the n-th column, the column width for the n-th column will not be appropriate to the data in the field (eg task name column will have appropriate for number fields)

We have tried using text mode to set fixed widths, but manual adjustments overide text mode settings, and text mode has some limitations (apparently the sum of the fixed column widths cannot exceed approx 1500 pixels).

I wish Workfront would

1) make the manual adjustments to widths views specific for a user

2) allow users to readily reset the columns for views to the default widths

3) automatically choose more appropriate widths based on the data the field if width is not specified

4) allow the sum of manual set column widths to exceed 1500 pixels or set as a percentage of screen width

Finally, though not really a column width problem, I would also like to set the maximum number of lines displayed for a field - especially for text, rich text and the condition update fields so I don't end up with a very long row when there is a long text entry

[#4]

Keith Gaff

I just had to come back and reinforce your comment below, as it continues to be exceptionally frustrating to have to deal with this especially Cause #3

Cause 3) Manual adjustments to the n-th column width are kept when switching from view to view, ie they are not user and view specific. Thus if the user has manually adjusted the width and if two views have significantly different type of data in the n-th column, the column width for the n-th column will not be appropriate to the data in the field (eg task name column will have appropriate for number fields)

[#5]

I agree. Constantly manually adjusting the column widths one by one is infuriating. The column size set widths don't always make sense (and often do not work) when screen sizes are different. I am continually flipping from my 13" laptop screen to an extra-large external monitor. It would be lovely if the reports would adjust based on the screen size in a smart manner...meaning the width of the items.

And to add, we need to have a narrow row view as well. Sometimes if you have a huge field such as description, the row is high. I often want to see a single row height (like the Gantt chart view).

Possibly have a columns & screen adjustment option for preferred width/height...fit to screen, narrow, wide, etc.