When you try convert a field/column from a Single Line text field to Single Select field, fields go missing

markusername · May 18, 2026, 9:39am

Are you using our SaaS platform (Baserow.io) or self-hosting Baserow?

SaaS

What are the exact steps to reproduce this issue?

Import an excel sheet to use as a new table in Baserow
Select header of a column and click ‘Edit Field’. It is currently a Single line text type field.
From the field type dropdown, change your selection from ‘Single line text’ [current selection] to ‘Single select’
Click Save
The column updates but a number of random cells (that were previously filled with text) throughout the column go blank/empty

Attach screenshots, videos, or logs that demonstrate the issue.

olgatrykush · May 18, 2026, 3:55pm

Hey @markusername, just to confirm, were the values that disappeared just short text values?

markusername · May 19, 2026, 7:43am

Yes all short text values

olgatrykush · May 19, 2026, 1:37pm

And after the import, all the values were there, right? So they disappeared only after you changed the field type?

markusername · May 19, 2026, 2:10pm

Yes all the values were there after import & yes they then disappeared after I changed the field type

olgatrykush · May 19, 2026, 3:24pm

I just tried to reproduce the flow, but it’s working for me. Does that file contain many rows?

markusername · May 20, 2026, 7:58am

112 rows in the excel sheet i uploaded

olgatrykush · May 20, 2026, 9:49am

I suspect that more than 100 of them are unique values, and we have a limitation when converting a text field into a single select field, where the frontend only retrieves unique values with limit=100, limiting the number of options to 100.

Could that be the reason? Or do you have fewer than 100 unique values in that field?

markusername · May 22, 2026, 10:23am

No there’s probably only 30-40 unique values in the field

olgatrykush · May 25, 2026, 1:30pm

Hey @markusername, that’s strange. Could you please try again?

sila · September 17, 2026, 1:36am

I am getting the same bug. For me, when converting a single-line text field to a single-select one, only the first new single-select option (out of the converted list of all the possible values) becomes empty when the field is converted.

Also, it seems that renaming this same single-select option seems to be a workaround for now, making the cells with that value be properly mapped (instead of disappearing) upon conversion.