We’ve gotten a lot of requests for the ability to color/highlight fields and it’s something we’re considering. Here’s an article on how to approximate color-coding, in the meantime.

Related to the above support article, I would say that there are two general reasons for which our users have requested colors (which aren’t really the same request, and thus require different solutions and different approaches from a product standpoint):

1. Manually color individual cells/rows/columns to “tag” something (e.g. every vegetarian in this list of dinner attendees has a green background)


2. Conditional formatting to color a certain record given a certain condition (e.g. make it so that every overdue project automatically appears with a red background)

For users who want colors for the first purpose, a colorful single select field may be the best bet, and for users that want colors for the second purpose, a formula field combined with emoji is a good alternative.

How would you all like to use colors in your workflows? Something more manual and freeform, or something like conditional formatting? What specific benefits would it bring you? Would you want to highlight entire fields or records, or just individual cells? If you have any feedback, please let us know!

I’m in the “wanting to use color to tag a record” group. I have a table of fifty people, divided into different color groups. Right now I have a multiple select field where I select the color group they are in, but I agree with other users that is is a waste of a column (even though I’ve hidden it) when it would be easier (and more visually appealing) to be able to color an entire record. Sorting by color would also be helpful, so I could keep the group members together.

Since you already have the multiple select field, you can group and sort by that multiple select field (the sort order is determined by the order of entries when you go to “Customize field type”). Note that if anyone is assigned two or more colours (which you can do with multiple select), they will appear in their own “group” and will not appear in any of the individual groups they’ve been assigned to. (Say Bob is both “Blue” and “Red”, he would appear in a group “Blue & Red”, and would be absent from “Blue” and “Red” separately.)

If you don’t mind the colour implementation occasionally breaking due to code updates in the AirTable HTML, you can use something like Stylish/Stylus to apply a custom CSS to your tables.

For example, this is what I use to colour linked and calculated fields (to show that they can’t be manually edited):

div.cellcdata-columntype~=“lookup”],

div.cellddata-columntype~=“count”],

div.cell data-columntype~=“rollup”] {

background-color: aliceblue;

}

div.cell>data-columntype~=“formula”] {

background-color: ivory;

}

You can also use div.celladata-columnid="(column id)"] to target a specific field.

If you want to highlight particular records, you’ll need to use something that’ll run custom JS, like Greasemonkey/Tampermonkey. Since it’s a bit more involved and has the potential to cause problems with site function, I won’t go into depth on the topic.

To give you an idea of what that looks like, here are two screenshots from my own base:

This is a grid view of our publication calendar. The first field {Full Title} is a formula field so it’s coloured “ivory” by default, but record #1 is blue because I’ve parsed the content using Tampermonkey and set a custom attribute on the cell, which then gets picked up by the CSS. The third column is coloured “aliceblue” because it’s a lookup field. The coloured bar at the start of each row is based on the last three fields in the screenshot: {Site}, {Story}, {Photos}. The green and purple columns are part of AirTable’s filter and grouping functions, not part of the custom CSS.

This is a calendar view of the same data as the grid. Items that are “completed” are coloured blue. The coloured bars are again based on {Site}, {Story}, {Photos}.* Holidays are displayed without borders and have a pink background and negative margins (to overflow the regular cell position). There are a few other tweaks as well, such as hiding the sidebar, or displaying the full entry content on hover (see July 5).

Note that this is very much a hack and any changes to the AirTable backend will probably break the code. (The calendar view code, for example, was significantly altered sometime in June, IIRC. It used to be coded as a table with each calendar entry nesting logically within each day, and each day nesting within a week (so you could easily do things like shrink or hide the weekends). Now the entries “float” over top of the calendar grid, so when you resize a particular “day” column, it has no effect on the entries that supposedly fall within it. One interesting side effect is that you can easily hack entries to span multiple days, just by changing their width, which is set in fixed percentages. I haven’t done so here, since I’m too lazy to figure out how to handle overlaps and spanning across weeks.)

*Note that you can’t actually access those fields from the calendar view unless they’re displayed. One workaround is to pass the information onto the {Full Title} primary field by tacking on a “code” to the end to indicate the state of those three fields (I used Unicode superscript numbers because we never use them in story titles). Then use Greasemonkey to parse the “code” and inject the appropriate divs and attributes, and then delete the “code” from the div content.

Hi Andy, Could you please advise where should I write your suggested code for colouring?

Thanks in advance

Thu Anh

Hi Andy,

I was able to install Stylus and cope the CSS you suggested but nothing change on my airtable base. The screen of my work as below. It would be very helpful if you could have a look and advise me what wrong did I do.

Billion thanks

Thu Anh

We’ve gotten a lot of requests for the ability to color/highlight fields and it’s something we’re considering. Here’s an article on how to approximate color-coding, in the meantime.

Related to the above support article, I would say that there are two general reasons for which our users have requested colors (which aren’t really the same request, and thus require different solutions and different approaches from a product standpoint):

1. Manually color individual cells/rows/columns to “tag” something (e.g. every vegetarian in this list of dinner attendees has a green background)


2. Conditional formatting to color a certain record given a certain condition (e.g. make it so that every overdue project automatically appears with a red background)

For users who want colors for the first purpose, a colorful single select field may be the best bet, and for users that want colors for the second purpose, a formula field combined with emoji is a good alternative.

How would you all like to use colors in your workflows? Something more manual and freeform, or something like conditional formatting? What specific benefits would it bring you? Would you want to highlight entire fields or records, or just individual cells? If you have any feedback, please let us know!

Hey everyone! Today we just released record coloring, which is a Pro plan feature that lets you set colors for records based on filter-like conditions. It works on calendar, grid, kanban, and gallery views—for calendar, the whole card receives a color; for grid, kanban, and gallery, the value in the primary field gets a color flag. Read more about it here!

I totally agree with @Andre_Zijlstra here. We should be able to set the background color of a cell base on it’s value.

I use AirTable for financial projection and there is no way for me right to underline irregularities through color coding.

This is an absolute must for a tool like AirTable.

The record coloring feature feels like a half-way good solution.

Cheers,

J.

This is what I do right now with Stylus (very hacky by the way).

This is what I want to be able to do on AirTable. I want to gray out blank cells There’s a reason they’re blank!

I can see it has been stated multiple times, but in the event Airtable needs a certain threshold or number of requests in order to drive a change or update, I’ll back the above. I noticed early in this string @Katherine_Duh mentioned 2 different drivers for color-fill and asks users to specify which they’re seeking since each would represent a different solution on Airtable’s end. It seems both are in-demand and are relatively simple requests considering they’re viewed as basic functionality of this kind of software/service.

My larger need presently is to have the conditional fill. While the conditional insertion of an “emoji” in a cell is a workaround for some people it doesn’t work for our need because when you use the conditional emoji drop in the formula it REMOVES our currency formatting for the rest of the column, which then presents another problem. Using the emoji as a “red flag” for the cell would be fine if it didn’t kill our formatting for the rest of the column. Since it does, having the conditional color-fill again becomes a more viable solution, since it wouldn’t require inserting a character outside those allowed by the “Currency” formatting.

I noticed one person reference the user-expectation that this function like excel, and I second that. Airtable offers a lot of valuable functionality beyond something like excel, but if some of the seemingly basic elements cannot work comparable to competing solutions, it is likely to drive users to go back to using excel for spreadsheet and another competing solution for the rest of the functionality. I’d be curios to learn the issue or problem presented with this case to make the adjustment in Airtable to be more inclusive and user-friendly.

I don’t understand this. A Formula field does not affect other fields content, and you always can add the currency symbol on your own if the result is a combined string and not a number.

I’m not sure I completely understand how you’re referencing the formula and its impact on other fields. At the top of the table, where you input the formula and formatting for any/each given column, it impacts the input (including formatting) for each cell in the entire column (i.e. if you input something in the formula that doesn’t ‘work’ with certain formatting types, it removes the ability to format in that way). When you add the condition for the emoji it removes the ability to use the currency formatting for the entire column, and while we might be able to manually insert a “$” symbol into each cell in the column, that would mean a manual addition to a lot of cells for multiple tables across multiple of our clients. Manually adding that is not really a solution because it would be faster to simply build the same thing from scratch in excel, defeating the purpose. In addition, when the currency formatting is removed, it also removes the 2 numbers past decimal point limit (i.e. $25.xx) so after the formula runs, instead of $25.33 you might get 25.32378128339274. This again just becomes a mess and neither my colleagues nor our clients want to see our primary point of reference reports look like this.