Preview Note body in Base view

[eraserlark]

What I’m trying to do

Hi all,
I’m looking to see if there’s a way to show the first ~100 characters of a note in a base table/card view? A lot of my notes are quick thoughts that don’t warrant titles. This makes it tough to scan through tables since the note body is the only thing giving context.

Things I have tried

I’ve checked through the forums but haven’t found much luck on an answer. Seems like Obsidian doesn’t natively support showing the body text of a note in a base view?
I’ve also looked into Dataview and have found luck being able to display body text in its tables. However I can’t find a way to truncate the text effectively (things like bulleted lists take up a lot of screen space)

Any help appreciated!

[ariehen]

@eraserlark

if there’s a way to show the first ~100 characters of a note in a base table/card view?

Bases don’t/can’t read the contents of notes, only the Properties and cached metadata about the note, so that’s out.

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Some folks, including me, have a longer description in the YAML/frontmatter/Properties that you can view in Bases. This one was created by the WebClipper; others are manually entered:

There may be a community plugin that adds the first 100 or so characters of a note to a Property automatically. If not, I’d like to see one.