We use Multiple Lines of Text (MLT’s) for so many things in SharePoint don’t we. However, creating views around those fields is not so friendly.

It’s so often that we want to see when a field is either blank or contains text, so you try use “is not equal to” and leave the next field empty, or “is equal to” and try specify text.

But if you try that in the Filter section of the views, you’ll get an error :

In my list specifically, I want to know when comments are entered into my MLT field so I can do a targeted alert on great feedback we receive.  The work-around is to add a filter for each vowel as follows :

Not ideal at all, but least it works.

Thanks to run4it for sharing this work-around.  If you know a better, non-code way to do this, please let us know.