Appended Comments Fields Not displaying in Open with Access SharePoint 2013

Question

I have an Issues List which is actively been used as a helpdesk ticketing system amongst one of the groups within my organization. Within that list we have Comments Field( Multiple Line Of text) and its set to Append changes to existing text.

One of the Office Admins uses the "Open with Access" Feature of that list to open the list in the access view and do some reporting. We are able to open the list in the Access, but Comments Field is not displaying the appended comments in that Comments field we talked about above.

Is there something I need to turn on to activate that or is it not supported?

Answer 1

i found out why blank Spaces or empty view in the access mode. A user edited the list item, but user didnt add the comment on that item, so it registered blank spaces and appended that to last updated item in the comments field. Since Comments Field in Access view only retrives most recent updated comments in the field, mince was displayed as blank. Since last user who edited didnt add anything in the comments column.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue when exporting a list with an appended column to Excel. I was able to capture the value being sent when no edit had been made to the appended column via a workflow history, and it was revealed to be saving <div></div>. I used a workflow to copy the values from the appended column to a different column now used in report generation, only when the value wasn't <div></div>. In that way, the "reporting" column always has the last "actual" edit made to the appended column.