Is there a way to black out a cell?

Hi @Katherine_Vantosh - you can’t black out a cell, but you can highlight the record. There are a couple of ways of doing this (at least):

1. If you are on the Pro plan you can use the conditional colours:

Which gives you the coloured vertical bars at the LHS of each record:

2. You could create your own formula field that displays when the Value field is empty:

using the formula:

IF(NOT(Value), '⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️⬛️')

JB

Great - I am on the Pro plan and this is exactly what I needed! Thank you!

Hi @JonathanBowen -
Trying to implement your great suggestions and now that I’m deeper into the problem, I realize I didn’t properly explain the nuance of what I am needing …

I am very new to Airtable and I apologize if my questions or Airtable-specific vocabulary reflects that! Here’s a more detailed explanation of what I was hoping to do …

I’m making an Airtable spreadsheet for investment properties that my husband and I own. The initial table of information includes all of the data that you find on a typical county “Property Record Card”, which is primarily information pertaining to taxes. I am trying to include historic data going back to when we purchased the property (the first of which was purchased in 2017, so thankfully not too far back). The columns I have that relate to historic tax data are as follows: 2017 Tax to County; 2017 Tax to City; 2018 Tax to County; 2018 Tax to City; 2019 Tax to County; 2019 Tax to City; 2020 Tax to County; 2020 Tax to City. Clearly, if we owned the property back to 2017, I will have data to fill in the cells for every aforementioned column. However, I clearly don’t want to record data that doesn’t pertain to us (i.e. data collected before we took ownership of the property). I was hoping there was a way that I could direct Airtable to highlight the fields that are not applicable to the question?

For example, if we bought Property E on 4/23/19, I was hoping I could say something along the lines of: if a property was purchased during 2019, it is not necessary to collect data for prior years. If 2019 is entered as the year, please automatically make the cells relating to 2018 & 2017 incapable of receiving data (or highlight them in some way to that I automatically know not to gather unnecessary data). In other words, I would like to be able to look at the spreadsheet and know that blank cells represent work that remains to be done!