Empty String Shows [] for Canvas Formula

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#1

What I’m really trying to do is conditional format the text output of a canvas formula. So when everyones reading the doc it says Reading in red and when everyones done reading it says Finished in green.

There doesn’t appear to be conditional formatting so went with this posts suggestion of having 2 separate formulas. Each formula is formatted seperatly and shows empty text when it should be hidden.

The issue is empty text displays as brackets instead of nothing

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Even if I can get it to show nothing it looks like there be an white space colored red or green. Anyway to do this using canvas formula? While I could use a button and disable the button, there’s several other uses for conditional canvas formula formatting where a button isn’t a great solution.

Ideas?

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#2

Wrap in Concatenate()

#3

Same result

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#4

How about: If(True(), ' ', ' ')

#5

It does remove the but you also get a blank space which is highlighted.

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Really what I want is conditional formatting for a formula or canvas text. I want to show/hide the status which is highlighted green/red.

Using a single space removes the but then you get a single highlighted space. I guess it will have to do if I want to go this direction.

#6

I want that too!

Until then you might just have to skip the color or add an emoji instead

#7

There’s no way to hide the [] for a canvas formula that returns blank.

You may want to combine two formulas (the one saying Reading and the one optionally saying Finished) as one:

If(
  FinishedUpdateReview.Count() = 7,
  "Finished Reading",
  "Reading"
)

If you want some formatting there, put your labels on a separate table and reference these. @-references are your friend.

P.S. You can actually make a formula to return not a blank but a what-appears-to-be-blank, e.g. return "‎" which is actually an empty character copied from e.g. here: https://emptycharacter.com/

A pro-tip: you can actually use this one to add invisible empty characters to your column names so that you can have “same” named columns (which would actually differ in these invisible characters) or “empty” named columns.

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