Text values are the simplest type of field values and new fields in Dabble default to this type. A text field contains a piece of text. The text can consist of letters, numbers, words or phrases — there is no restriction on what a user types into the field. This makes them very flexible, but not very powerful. If you know that your data is something specific, like an email address, a number, a date or a geographical location, you should use one of the other types of field values.

There are two options you can change for text value fields in the field configuration.

You can specify a default value for when new entries are created with this field. This only applies to the future: existing entries will not have their values changed.

Dabble allows you to specify how big to make the box for data entry. The default is 1 line, but you can change it to 2, 5 or 10 lines to allow more text. Note that this only controls the visual size of the text box; it does not restrict how many lines a user may type into the box. For example, if you specify a 2-line box and the user types 3 lines into it, a scroll bar will appear. The user can only see 2 lines at a time, but all 3 are saved. The exception is the 1-line box which only allows a single line of text (albeit of any length).