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Exporting when you have a multiselect field into 1 row

Answered


Posted May 28, 2021

When exporting a report that has a column which is multi select field, when I export its separating each option selected into a new row for that same case. Therefore seeing multiple rows for the one case rather than one row but in that column listing all options selected. 

 

 


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6 comments

image avatar

Chandra Robrock

Most Helpful - 2021Community Moderator

Hey @...

We use a multi-select field at my company and it is expected that each value would be included in a separate row. That way, you can really slice and dice the data how you want to for each export.

For instance, if Ticket 1 had Option A selected, Ticket 2 had Option A and B selected and Ticket 3 had Option A and C selected, I can easily see how many tickets have Option A selected via the Export when its included in its own row. If all of that data were in one single cell on one row, I'd likely have to parse it somehow or count the values manually.

That said, I'd be curious to know a bit more about your specific use case. Is there a specific reason as to why you'd like all of the multi-select values associated with a single ticket to be included within a single cell?

That additional context would help myself and other Community Members know if there might be a good workaround we could recommend instead. :) 

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I'm working through a similar problem. 

I have 2 business lines, one digital and one travel. Sometimes there are tickets that relate to both business lines. I'd like to be able to parse out tickets dealing with just digital, tickets dealing with just travel, and tickets dealing with both digital and travel based on the multiselect.

I could make the custom field a drop down and just add "Hybrid" or "Both" as a 3rd option, but for clarity for my agents and for alignment with the rest of our company data structure, ideally I'd use the multiselect method with just digital and travel. Is that possible?

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

@Elon, 
 
If you opt to use multi-select field for your Business lines, you no longer have to parse it for it will have a separate row for each values on your exported file. 

-1


We are also using a multi-select field in our ticket form but it is causing a separate row for all the ticket IDs where there is more than one value in the ticket.

I do understand the idea of separate rows but it is not the best practice to look at your data where you can see a separate row for the same ticket ID.

Ticket ID 1 , ["Multi-Select Value 1",""Multi-Select Value 2","Multi-Select Value 3"]

 

Rather than 

Ticket ID 1 , "Multi-Select Value 1"

Ticket ID 1 , "Multi-Select Value 2"

Ticket ID 1 , "Multi-Select Value 3"

 

Feel free to ask any questions :) would love it if somebody able to answer mine.

 

1


I've had this same question - with my use case being: I'd like to run a report to know whether both Option A and Option B were selected in the multi-select. In my case this field is called Problem Area (internal)

It's not perfect, but a workable solution for me was to have a calculated metric that's counting the number of rows in the Problem Area field:

IF ([Problem Area (internal)] != NULL) THEN
    1
ELSE
    0
ENDIF

Then I add a filter on Problem Area (internal) to include only Option A and Option B.

The result is that I get a value of 2 in this column for both, or a value of 1 for one or the other.

 

This field can be re-used on other similar reports that I'm interested in, but I just change the filter to, for example, Option C and Option D.

 

Would still be awesome to have a way of including Problem Area as a single line for tickets, to then filter on and have other visualisations based off.

0


image avatar

Gab Guinto

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Phil,

Thanks for sharing this workaround! I'm sure others with a similar use case will find this really helpful.

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