BIP - mass resize of columns when editing a layout

Geraud Andreux

Description

Layout columns width could adjust to the size of the content, or be all adjusted at once

Use Case and Business Need

Hi All,

with the spirit that many small improvements will make a big difference in the long run, particularly on the perception of the overall "polishness" of the tool:

In BIP, when you are editing a report layout in the tool itself (rather than in Excel or Word), often the columns chosen in the data model will result in a report that is squeezed in the default paper size (letter), even in landscape.
This results in very narrow columns and the report is unreadable. As in many cases the reports have to be output in Excel rather than in a physical paper format, the width of the page doesn't matter.
It is possible to expand the size of the paper, by selecting the white space, and going to the properties to expand the width to a big number of pixels. That then allows you to resize each column manually, but that is difficult to do. They are hard to catch (you must be on the exact pixel for each column), and when you resize them others tend to auto-adjust, often illogically.

Could we have a button equivalent to the "auto-size" function in Excel, that would automatically widen the columns according to their content?
Ideally it would be driven by two parameters:
- minimum column width (no column smaller than this)
- maximum column width (no column wider than this)

all the other columns would be as narrow as possible, given the currently selected sample data, displayed in one line.

If the above is too complicated, one simpler solution that would go a long way twould be to simply have a "columns width" parameter, with an "Apply" button of sorts next to it. That would allow to set a number, press the apply button, and have all the columns resized to that size. We would then just have to adjust the few columns significantly wider or narrower than this value.

Ideally the size of the paper could be adjusted to the sum size of the columns. Again if too complicated we can keep this as a manual step before, like now.

thanks to consider it,

cheers,

Géraud

Original Idea Number: 8410d81ea8