We have many jobs that come from the DOT or Customers that have descriptions beyond 25 characters. We currently have to import the long description into the Phase note field and rework the all the reports via Crystal Reports to display the full description, this is very critical for sending out Sub Contracts as the subs may have multiple lines of items we are requesting, it would be better to have the full description on each line item of the subcontract, and to have to retype the information in a notes field is counter productive, plus every time I come across a report with the phase description I have to modify the report and each person has to use my reports and add it as their default. A lot of wasted time, just enlarge the field so everyone can see what the phase is really about.
Les Papp
| Company | Cardi Corp |
| Job Title / Role | IT / Programing |
| I need it... | Yesterday...Come on already |
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I agree, it does not exist. I constantly have to think of creative ways to enter descriptions in many Spectrum modules hoping coworkers understand my abbreviations.
You guys don't work in the real world, it doesn't exist, if it did, then your reports would use the comments field. You guys are just lazy.
I disagree with this status “already exists”, as Spectrum does not allow you to display the Comment field when you are looking at descriptions in the Phase area of Job Cost. The comment section is only effective when you are creating Crystal Reports (which by the way, your own canned reports for invoices and subcontracts do not display the comment for each phase which renders that field useless unless we create our own reports) or if you are reading the comment in Spectrum but not by the phase list.
This does not already exist. You have a work around. When our people are looking at any descriptions which may say something like “Demolish and Remove all o” Demolish and remove what?? They have no idea. We don’t want to have to do the extra work of abbreviating what we get as an import from our customers, which takes more time.
Just expand all description fields thru out Spectrum for Phases, Inventory, Equipment . . .. We are not back in the 1980’s where data was expensive and limited (I programmed back then and yes we kept things lean), but this is the 21st century. Even your Equipment model year is 2 digit, why not 4 digit. I have spent hours modifying reports to use the comment section as the description field, which costs our company money. If it already existed, all your reports would have been programmed with an option to use the comment field instead of the description field, and it would have saved all your users hours or costs of hiring consultants to change your reports.
Don’t worry about the reports, they can wait, but seriously, get it to exist. Please change the status of this request to coming or we won’t change it because we are still in the 1980s or something else, but not Already Exists.
Les Papp
The original design was that notes and comments would go into the Phase Summary notes...these are unlimited and where we intended this info to go.
We knew that we could not afford the resources to lengthen the description field, but we could add a text box (and not cause problems for users). So we decided to add the 'Comment' field as a way to let power users have a way to have longer descriptions.
Increasing field lengths is indeed on the list for the future, but today we have a solution to have additional text.
Thanks for writing in.
Geoff
Unfortunately, that seems like a poor work around. In the event that we need to also leverage the comment field for actual comments with regards to working on a specific phase, then what would we use? Certainly would't have to try and combine the fields for crystal reports, because then you have no way of splitting up the meaning.
Increasing field lengths in places such as job and phase descriptions has been a fairly common necessity requested by a lot of users, so it would be appreciated if it wasn't brushed off as 'Already Exists' when the only form of that is a work around that only leads to more work arounds when trying to fully utilize the system.
Today we have the Comment field which is 250 characters long. We intended this to be used for longer descriptions either when creating your own Crystal Reports or using Business Intelligence.