Fixed Width Font for Attribute Table

jcarlson — Fri, 29 Jan 2021 16:02:22 GMT

I would love the option to make certain fields in the Attribute Table display in a fixed-width font. To give one example, we have a table with document "numbers" in it, which are assigned by the County Recorder's Office:

In recent times, the County has moved to a standard 12-character string. These usually consist of numbers, but not always. Older documents often follow very different formats, as in the "73-1308" item pictured above. In very old documents, the format may be "Book 23 Pages 68-70".

Because of the variability in the field's contents, I can't simply enforce a 12-character value with attribute rules or regular expressions. Grabbing values that do not follow the standard 12-character format for manual review returns a lot of false flags. Because of this, I'll often review the documents "Name" column manually to check for typos.

It's not a huge use of time, so I don't care that I have to do it manually. What I care about is that the presence of letters in some of the names makes them appear to be of unequal length, when in fact they are not.

Here's a sample in Excel. Look how much nicer it is with fixed-width!

We've got some other departments that work with various permits, inspections, etc., and have run into a similar issue. It's minor, as issues go, but as I can't force other county departments to enforce data standards on what they give us, I'd at least like other ways to view the table.

In Pro, we currently have the Numeric Format option in the Fields view, which I absolutely love. Perhaps that could turn into something like Field Format? Based on the datatype, the dialog that displays could prompt for other things? (At the risk of violating the one-idea rule, I'd love to see more formatting options for datetime fields, too...)

idea Fixed Width Font for Attribute Table in ArcGIS Pro Ideas

Fixed Width Font for Attribute Table