So we have a client who was looking to have the Comments field from Activities in her related lists (for Leads, Contacts, etc.)  and I had forgotten that I’d done a cool little trick to show part of it (first 255) years ago for another customer.  when I “re-remembered” I thought I’d put it out there for anyone else who wanted to show at least part of it.  You have to have workflow to play, but if you’ve got it, it goes like this:   First, build a Text Area field  (255) on the activity record.  I called mine Short Comments. Next, build a workflow that runs every time a record is created or updated – and have it fill the field with a formula.  the formula is      MID(Description, 1, 255) The next time you add or update a task, you’ll create that field.  You need to run a Dataloader job to fire the workflow for the history records but that should do it.   We hid the field on the main page layout, and then added it to the related lists: