Is this possible? Coloring a cell based on a cell from another table

[Calvin_Lo]

Just wanna ask if this is possible… i’ve spent way too much time looking for a solution to what I want to happen already.

So I have a column in table B called “version”… I want the color for each cell to change according to the cell value from table A that has all the latest product’s latest versions. Green if the version from both tables match, and red if they don’t match. That’s basically it.

I can’t find a way to reference a record in the conditional coloring box.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

A couple things in response to this -

First of all, Airtable has no concept of coloring a “cell”, so I’m assuming you are referring to coloring a “record” (Airtable puts a little colored bar on the left side of the record’s primary field (usually “Name”).

I assume Table A and Table B are linked in some way? If you have a field linking a record from Table A to a record from Table B, you can do this by pulling the field you need to check against from Table A into Table B with a Lookup field. Next, you’ll need a formula to check for the intended version from Table B to see if it exists in all the linked records from Table A. Then, you can base your color field on that final formula.

SEARCH() returns blank if the string is not found in the source, so the color check looks for “Empty” or “Not Empty” to determine if the versions match. You need that little &"" at the end of the SEARCH() formula to convert the value in the Lookup field from an array to a string.

Hopefully that helps - let me know if you need further clarification.

[Calvin_Lo]

Thanks Jeremy but unfortunately, i guess what I want is not yet possible. I need the cell or even the text in the cell colored. My column name will be the products but the data is the version. And each record represents a customer so I would like to know at a quick glance which product I sent them that are outdated.

I guess I have to rethink of another way to display things.

*I changed my original question. My understanding of a record is the data inside a cell and not a whole row.

[Jeremy_Oglesby]

An option that comes to mind is to have a field called “Outdated Products” that lists each product version a person has that is out of date. It would require Lookups in the same way as above, and then combined with a big, long, hairy, nested conditional formula that makes checks against all existing products and spits out the info that you need into that one field.
Here’s an example of a similar style of field that I use:

Each emoji in that “Incomplete!” field is generated by a conditional check in the formula and represents a field that is flagged as needing attention - if none do, that field is blank. Not exactly like your use-case, but similar enough, I surmise.

If that sounds like an avenue you’d like to pursue and need more help, I’d suggest a new support post specific to any struggles you encounter trying to implement that.

[Calvin_Lo]

thanks! I’ll play around with your idea and see if that works for me. My concern there is that the conditional formatting might be too long as we continue to add products.

[Karlstens]

I’m now solving this limited colouring issue with workflows, by having a colour field in both the entry table and the lookup table, and then having an Airtable automation update the entry colour field when the colour-lookup field is not empty.

Works well enough in testing, not sure of the big-picture ramifications though.