Note Field Archive??

[Brian Stebbins]

Hello again all,

I have a task in a project that has 2 very loquacious people assigned to
it. They're very good about documenting what they did during the hours in
the "Note" field. However, they both tend to be TOO verbose... which brings
me to the reason for this post. They've hit the 4000 character limit for
the note field. I seem to recall a way to "clear" the note field without
losing the data. A way to archive it, so I still have all notes, but they
can add new ones without the 4000 limit imposing upon their ability to be...
well... over-thorough. I've checked my books, MS Pro help, and MS online
help. I haven't found it yet, but like I said I have that tingly feeling in
the back of me head telling me I read something about this before. So I
thought I'd post and see if any of you know if I'm crazy, or if it can be
done. There's just SO MUCH material to poor through I think I missed it...
Thanks to all involved with this newsgroup!!

-Brian Stebbins
Glasstech Inc.

 

[John]

Hello again all,

I have a task in a project that has 2 very loquacious people assigned to
it. They're very good about documenting what they did during the hours in
the "Note" field. However, they both tend to be TOO verbose... which brings
me to the reason for this post. They've hit the 4000 character limit for
the note field. I seem to recall a way to "clear" the note field without
losing the data. A way to archive it, so I still have all notes, but they
can add new ones without the 4000 limit imposing upon their ability to be...
well... over-thorough. I've checked my books, MS Pro help, and MS online
help. I haven't found it yet, but like I said I have that tingly feeling in
the back of me head telling me I read something about this before. So I
thought I'd post and see if any of you know if I'm crazy, or if it can be
done. There's just SO MUCH material to poor through I think I missed it...
Thanks to all involved with this newsgroup!!

-Brian Stebbins
Glasstech Inc.

Brian,
I've done a fair amount of work with text in the Notes field but I
wasn't aware there was a 4000 character limit so that's a new one for
me. As far a archiving the Notes field, there are only a few methods I
know for doing so. The first is to archive the whole file and then start
a new version of the file with the Notes field cleared. However, that
doesn't keep all the Notes text in a single file. I suppose another
method would be to transfer the Notes text to one of the spare text
fields but any text formatting (e.g. line feeds & carriage returns) will
need to be removed or the text won't copy properly. A third method, and
this is probably the best bet, is to export or cut and paste the Notes
text to another application that has more text flexibility, for example
Word or even Excel.

Hope this helps.
John

 

[JulieS]

Hi Brian,
In addition to John's comments, if you take the information in the notes
field out into Word for example, you can then create a hyperlink to the Word
document for the project task. Your detail documenters could then just add
their notes, etc to the hyperlinked Word document, save and then carry on.
Not quite as elegant as the notes field, but just a suggestion.
Hope this helps.
Julie

 

[JackD]

John,

Your second solution - copy to a text field - will require using half of the
available text fields.
As you probably remembered right after you posted, text fields are limited
to 255 characters.

 

[Gerard Ducouret]

Hello everybody,
Brian, where did you really "hit the 4000 character limit for the note
field." ?
I just tried with more than 260,000 characters without any problem (Project
2002)
I didn't counted the characters in the Note field of Project put copied and
pasted them in MS Word which counts the characters in a document.
NB : I'm not so verbose ! It was just for a test!

Gérard Ducouret

 

[John]

John,

Your second solution - copy to a text field - will require using half of the
available text fields.
As you probably remembered right after you posted, text fields are limited
to 255 characters.

Jack,
Actually I wasn't aware of the 255 limit in spare text fields but I'm
not surprised. That's why I "supposed" using spare text fields was a
method. Obviously it's not a very viable method.

John