SharePoint 2010 : Choose a Column Type (part 2) - Multiple Lines of Text

The Multiple Lines of Text column type allows users to enter text with more than one line (that is, line breaks are allowed). It can be configured to allow different editing options for the user, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Different configurations of the Multiple Lines of Text column.

As shown in Figure 7.18, the column type can be configured to allow rich formatting of the text: You can make parts of the text bold, underlined, or a different font or color, and you can even include pictures, tables, and links. This configuration is not available in document libraries, and you see it only when adding a site column or a column in a list.

The enhanced rich text option shows as an empty text box, but when the user switches to that text box, the Editing Tools ribbon appears, enabling the user to edit the text using the enhanced text-editing options available through that ribbon, as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. The Editing Tools ribbon is displayed to the user when in an enhanced rich textbox control.

Figure 7 shows the settings for this column type. This column type does not support a default value, so there is no setting to configure one. However, you can configure the column with three settings that are special for this column type, as explained in the following sections.

Figure 7. Defining the settings for a Multiple Lines of Text column type.