Free text: the field that destroys every report

A free text field is the path of least resistance when designing anything that collects information. Nobody has to decide the possible answers, nobody argues about the list, and everything fits. The cost arrives months later, when somebody asks how many of something there were and the honest answer is that nobody can tell, because the same thing was written eleven different ways.

What free text does to a register

• It cannot be counted. "Late delivery", "delivered late", "late (again)" and "LATE" are four values to a computer and one to a human.
• It cannot be filtered reliably, so the list that should take a second to produce becomes a reading exercise.
• It hides the common case. The pattern you most need to see is split across spellings.
• It invites commentary — opinion, context and blame end up in a field somebody will later export.
• It leaks personal information into fields nobody expected to contain any, which matters when the register is shared.

When free text is the right answer

When the value is genuinely unique and will never be aggregated: a description of what happened, a note for the next person, the specifics of one case. Prose is the correct format for anything a human will read once and nobody will count. The failure is not using free text — it is using it for the fields that answer questions: category, status, cause, owner, outcome. Those are the ones somebody will try to total, and they need a short list of agreed values instead.

The useful pattern is both: a controlled value for what kind of thing this is, and a free text field beside it for the detail. One answers the report, the other answers the question "what actually happened here" — and trying to make a single field do both is what produces registers nobody trusts.

Designing the list instead

1. Collect what people have already written, then group it — the real categories are in the existing data rather than in a workshop.
2. Keep the list short enough to read without scrolling; a list of forty is a free text field with extra steps.
3. Include "other" with a note field, and review what lands in it quarterly — that is where the missing category announces itself.
4. Define each value in one line, because two people reading "escalated" differently is the same problem in a new form.
5. Resist adding values on request; each one makes every earlier record slightly less comparable.

Recovering a register already full of prose

Do not attempt to clean the history by hand. Add the controlled field, start populating it from today, and backfill only the period you actually report on — usually the current year. Most registers are consulted for the last few months and audited for the current period, so cleaning three years of free text is work nobody will ever benefit from. A clean break with a date on it is more honest than a partial retrofit that looks complete.

Ettex Sheets lets a column hold a defined set of values rather than anything somebody types, which turns counting into a formula instead of a reading exercise. The same discipline belongs upstream, in whatever form feeds the register, where the argument about required fields is the same argument.