Finally there, hide a choice column value, or not?

Some of you still probably know them as option sets, but nowadays they are called Choice columns, and Microsoft has recently released functionality to hide the choice column values. But the question is, is it working like we think it is or not? I have seen some threads on the community forum where initial responses were that it is not designed for what we think it should do (blog link).

Personally speaking, I believe this was on lots of people their lists when it comes to enhancements that would make maintenance a lot easier, so excited about this!

For a long time, the Choice Columns, also known as Option Sets, were not something you could easily manage. Once they were there, it was hard to get rid of. Every time there was a use-case to create some sort of “dropdown”, I always thought, shall I go for the Choice Columns or the Table (Entity)?

Over the years, I have seen different “resolutions” for this, things like:

Prefix the value with DNU and put the original value behind it
Using JavaScript to hide elements

How to hide a choice column value?

To hide a Choice column value is very simple to do; follow the next steps:

Open the Choice column that you would like to update. in the example below, I would like to hide the “Charcoal & smoking wood” option from the Inquiry Type Choice column

Select behind the Charcoal & smoking wood option, the three dots > Additional properties

Select Hide and press Save

When the column and table are published, and when you now open the choice column, you will see that the “Charcoal & smoking wood” option is now not available.

What happens with the data once an option is hidden?

Once you have decided to hide an option, let’s use the “Charcoal & smoking wood“; the question is, though, what happens with the existing data? As you can see, the option is selected and disabled, so this would allow you to change it to one of the options that are available.