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Please consider adding conditional formatting based on formulas. This is a key feature in Excel and would greatly help in Airtable.

Bump! This is a crucial feature.

Yup. On top of the traditional; In order to assure records are fulfilled properly. For example: When creating a new record and the Title field is filled, other fields in the same record can turn color to indicated a required field. Or could also be based on a priority field.

Yup. On top of the traditional; In order to assure records are fulfilled properly. For example: When creating a new record and the Title field is filled, other fields in the same record can turn color to indicated a required field. Or could also be based on a priority field.


Love that idea! That would be a huge help.

This would be really helpful to be able to have an entire row light up depending on the value of one cell (such as highlighting past due items).

Formatting in general would be a great addition too.

Bump! You’re trying to get people to abandon spreadsheets and come on over, right? :grinning_face_with_big_eyes:

Definite must please.

I would guess that this is one of our top five most requested features, and it’s definitely on our roadmap! Something else that we need to consider with regard to all of your feedback is whether “conditional formatting” would mean row-by-row conditional formatting, or cell-by-cell conditional formatting, as these would essentially be completely different features in terms of implementation.


In the meantime, besides the suboptimal manual solution of tagging records with the color selections from a single/multiple select field, there’s a cute little workaround you can do involving emoji/Unicode characters in formula fields. Let’s say that you want some way to easily tell whether something is overdue. You could use a formula: IF(IS_BEFORE({Due Date}, TODAY()), “ 💥 ”, " ") which would return the 💥 emoji if the value in the “Due Date” column is earlier than the current date.



Also, while we are trying to get people to abandon spreadsheets… sort of… :winking_face: , our philosophy is that we don’t want to just take features 1:1 from spreadsheets to Airtable: instead, we want to carefully reconsider the underlying use cases/problems to be solved and to find new design patterns that best solve these problems.


To this end, we would love any or all of you who expressed interest in conditional formatting to describe in greater detail how you might use this feature, so that we can take your particular use cases into consideration!

I would guess that this is one of our top five most requested features, and it’s definitely on our roadmap! Something else that we need to consider with regard to all of your feedback is whether “conditional formatting” would mean row-by-row conditional formatting, or cell-by-cell conditional formatting, as these would essentially be completely different features in terms of implementation.


In the meantime, besides the suboptimal manual solution of tagging records with the color selections from a single/multiple select field, there’s a cute little workaround you can do involving emoji/Unicode characters in formula fields. Let’s say that you want some way to easily tell whether something is overdue. You could use a formula: IF(IS_BEFORE({Due Date}, TODAY()), “ 💥 ”, " ") which would return the 💥 emoji if the value in the “Due Date” column is earlier than the current date.



Also, while we are trying to get people to abandon spreadsheets… sort of… :winking_face: , our philosophy is that we don’t want to just take features 1:1 from spreadsheets to Airtable: instead, we want to carefully reconsider the underlying use cases/problems to be solved and to find new design patterns that best solve these problems.


To this end, we would love any or all of you who expressed interest in conditional formatting to describe in greater detail how you might use this feature, so that we can take your particular use cases into consideration!


Katherine, while I do love your idea, I still see the need of formatting. I have been using solutions similar to what you suggest and they do work, better or worse depending on the case. To me the biggest reason to have conditional formatting is to reduce the amount of redundant fields. I am creating bases that extend forever to the left and using additional fields just to attract visibility to values in certain columns creates much wider workspaces. This compounds with the inability (maybe only mine?) to make columns really really really thin (like just fitting your emoji there). I know and often use views to restrict what’s visible, but I do very often need a big overview of a lot of moving parts (and a bigger screen too, I know)


I would also love to apply conditional formatting in lookup fields to emulate single selects appearance. I often have lookup fields from single selects in another table and it would be ideal to keep or replicate the colors from the original table.

I would guess that this is one of our top five most requested features, and it’s definitely on our roadmap! Something else that we need to consider with regard to all of your feedback is whether “conditional formatting” would mean row-by-row conditional formatting, or cell-by-cell conditional formatting, as these would essentially be completely different features in terms of implementation.


In the meantime, besides the suboptimal manual solution of tagging records with the color selections from a single/multiple select field, there’s a cute little workaround you can do involving emoji/Unicode characters in formula fields. Let’s say that you want some way to easily tell whether something is overdue. You could use a formula: IF(IS_BEFORE({Due Date}, TODAY()), “ 💥 ”, " ") which would return the 💥 emoji if the value in the “Due Date” column is earlier than the current date.



Also, while we are trying to get people to abandon spreadsheets… sort of… :winking_face: , our philosophy is that we don’t want to just take features 1:1 from spreadsheets to Airtable: instead, we want to carefully reconsider the underlying use cases/problems to be solved and to find new design patterns that best solve these problems.


To this end, we would love any or all of you who expressed interest in conditional formatting to describe in greater detail how you might use this feature, so that we can take your particular use cases into consideration!


Katherine - @Patricia_Olender explains it perfectly. I’m in the same situation. Although now that I think about it, I do need to keep those extra columns for people with trouble seeing colors. Nice idea with the emojis.

I would guess that this is one of our top five most requested features, and it’s definitely on our roadmap! Something else that we need to consider with regard to all of your feedback is whether “conditional formatting” would mean row-by-row conditional formatting, or cell-by-cell conditional formatting, as these would essentially be completely different features in terms of implementation.


In the meantime, besides the suboptimal manual solution of tagging records with the color selections from a single/multiple select field, there’s a cute little workaround you can do involving emoji/Unicode characters in formula fields. Let’s say that you want some way to easily tell whether something is overdue. You could use a formula: IF(IS_BEFORE({Due Date}, TODAY()), “ 💥 ”, " ") which would return the 💥 emoji if the value in the “Due Date” column is earlier than the current date.



Also, while we are trying to get people to abandon spreadsheets… sort of… :winking_face: , our philosophy is that we don’t want to just take features 1:1 from spreadsheets to Airtable: instead, we want to carefully reconsider the underlying use cases/problems to be solved and to find new design patterns that best solve these problems.


To this end, we would love any or all of you who expressed interest in conditional formatting to describe in greater detail how you might use this feature, so that we can take your particular use cases into consideration!


Hi Katherine, can you quickly explain the syntax for including unicode characters for this?


Many thanks.

Hi Katherine, can you quickly explain the syntax for including unicode characters for this?


Many thanks.


There shouldn’t be any special syntax involved for writing unicode characters—you can generate the unicode character however you would elsewhere, and then copy and paste it into Airtable. :thumbs_up: 💯 👌

I would guess that this is one of our top five most requested features, and it’s definitely on our roadmap! Something else that we need to consider with regard to all of your feedback is whether “conditional formatting” would mean row-by-row conditional formatting, or cell-by-cell conditional formatting, as these would essentially be completely different features in terms of implementation.


In the meantime, besides the suboptimal manual solution of tagging records with the color selections from a single/multiple select field, there’s a cute little workaround you can do involving emoji/Unicode characters in formula fields. Let’s say that you want some way to easily tell whether something is overdue. You could use a formula: IF(IS_BEFORE({Due Date}, TODAY()), “ 💥 ”, " ") which would return the 💥 emoji if the value in the “Due Date” column is earlier than the current date.



Also, while we are trying to get people to abandon spreadsheets… sort of… :winking_face: , our philosophy is that we don’t want to just take features 1:1 from spreadsheets to Airtable: instead, we want to carefully reconsider the underlying use cases/problems to be solved and to find new design patterns that best solve these problems.


To this end, we would love any or all of you who expressed interest in conditional formatting to describe in greater detail how you might use this feature, so that we can take your particular use cases into consideration!


I like your sample code using Emoji and think this is certainly a great way to start distinguishing records.


My two most common use of conditional formatting is to note when a calculated (usually a rollup counting linked records) does not match the expected quantity listed as a simple integer in the adjacent column. It’s how I keep track of the changing linked records.


I like how Airtable makes relational databases friendly. I’m just starting to use the power under the hood.

Yes please, we need this feature.

I think something that would work for me, which would still be Airtable-y, would be to have a “Highlight” button next to the “Filter” and “Sort”, where we can highlight rows that meet a certain requirement.

I normally use a blank row of a different colour to easily see where I am in a spreadsheet when there are several rows related to one idea. In the meantime a poor man’s work around I am using is to enter XXX in all the fields of the blank row that I would normally use a different colour in. So yes please to some additional formatting 🙂

I think something that would work for me, which would still be Airtable-y, would be to have a “Highlight” button next to the “Filter” and “Sort”, where we can highlight rows that meet a certain requirement.


I’m into this. That would feel at home, especially on the grid view. Not sure how or if it’d apply to the Kanban/calendar/gallery views though.

Seconded. I use this ALL the time in other spreadsheet programs, and it’s enough to drag me reluctantly away from my beloved Airtable. This would be a slam dunk.

I would guess that this is one of our top five most requested features, and it’s definitely on our roadmap! Something else that we need to consider with regard to all of your feedback is whether “conditional formatting” would mean row-by-row conditional formatting, or cell-by-cell conditional formatting, as these would essentially be completely different features in terms of implementation.


In the meantime, besides the suboptimal manual solution of tagging records with the color selections from a single/multiple select field, there’s a cute little workaround you can do involving emoji/Unicode characters in formula fields. Let’s say that you want some way to easily tell whether something is overdue. You could use a formula: IF(IS_BEFORE({Due Date}, TODAY()), “ 💥 ”, " ") which would return the 💥 emoji if the value in the “Due Date” column is earlier than the current date.



Also, while we are trying to get people to abandon spreadsheets… sort of… :winking_face: , our philosophy is that we don’t want to just take features 1:1 from spreadsheets to Airtable: instead, we want to carefully reconsider the underlying use cases/problems to be solved and to find new design patterns that best solve these problems.


To this end, we would love any or all of you who expressed interest in conditional formatting to describe in greater detail how you might use this feature, so that we can take your particular use cases into consideration!


Hi Katherine,


Thanks for that suggestion of using the IF statement along with the IS_BEFORE to help highlight dates. It works for me, sort of…I have a table where not all of my entries have dates. While the workaround works nicely with all of the entries that have dates, any without a date report an error. Is there a way to deal with this?

Bump. Bump Would allow for amazing capabilities for visual reporting of data to others.

+1 this feature.


I use it for auto-highlighting things that are due at different stages (3 business days out ,versus next day, versus same day, versus overdue). Generally I put this formatting on one column of data (the ‘due date’) so that the sheet is not overcrowded.

Bump. This is a necessary feature for us to move our tools into AT.

Would be great to apply colors to rows based in formulas!

+1 for Conditional Formatting

Would also love this feature. Right now on a spreadhseet I have I would like to be able to say:


If this single select field type equals ‘to do’ then make the background of the row red. If this single select field type equals 'complete" then make the background of the row green.


It would make sense to be able to choose whether it was row or cell background colour that changed. I realise as well that you could run into difficulty if multiple columns have similar but different rules - I don’t know how other spreadsheets handle this. Perhaps rules could have priorities assigned.

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