Organize data with fields

When you add a new field to a note or insight, it will also be added to all other notes or insights in that project. This will allow you to capture information consistently across your work, so that you can easily locate, filter, and sort your data.

If there are fields added to notes and insights that you do not need to use across content in the project, you can hide these fields from view.

To add a field on your notes, open a note within your project and click + New field. From there, you can set a title, and select a note field type.

To add a field to your insights, open an insight within your project and click + New field. From there, you can set a title, and select a insight field type.

We currently support the following field types in notes and insights:

• Text – Any text characters, up to a maximum of 300.

• Number – Any positive or negative integer.

• Date – Any date in the format YYYY-MM-DD.

• Checkbox – A toggle switch for true / false.

• URL – Any valid website link or URL.

• Single select – Assign one option from a list of up to 200.

• Multi-select – Assign up to 100 options from a list of up to 200.

• People – Reference participants from People.

• Email – Any valid email address.

• Phone – Any valid phone number.

• NPS – Any number from 0-10 on the Net Promoter Score scale.

When a note or insight is editable, you can update the field title or value of a field by clicking the placeholder text to the right of the field name.

You can also drag and drop fields to rearrange their order.

Select fields help standardize how data is categorized by limiting field values to a curated list to select from.

Single-select fields are limited to displaying one value from the list, while multi-select fields allow up to 100 values for a given note or insight.

To create a list of values for single or multi-select fields, Open note or insight > Click field input next to field title > Type values in the text box. All values submitted in the text box of a field will automatically populate and save a list of values for you to use in the field.

After adding values, you can edit these to change text, change the color, or delete the value in Actions (•••) next to the value itself.

You can update many fields quickly by editing field properties in bulk. From any notes or insights view, Select notes or insights > Edit field > Update. This will apply updates to all notes or insights selected.

You may decide to change an existing field’s type. For example, a text field to a single or multi-select field. To do this in your note or insight, click on the field title > Hover over the field type > Select the new field type.

When converting to a select field (single or multi), all existing text turns into a list of values. For multi-select, commas will create separate categories in the list. If the number of values exceeds 100, Dovetail will remove some values.

When converting a multi-select field to a text field, the options for each multi-select field will be converted to a comma-separated list and select fields will be converted straight to text. This will not result in losing any data.

If you’re on a Team, Business or Enterprise plan, you can standardize fields across projects with workspace fields.

Workspace fields help pull together related information across a series of projects to ensure they can be grouped, searched and filtered together.

Managers and contributors can create these groups in settings and link these to a template or individual projects. Learn how workspace fields enable organize your research repository at scale, so research can easily be found and reused.