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Conditional Formatting

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Mike_Eovino
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

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

38 Comments
Max_Max
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Bump! This is a crucial feature.

David_Wiese
6 - Interface Innovator
6 - Interface Innovator

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.

Mike_Eovino
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Love that idea! That would be a huge help.

Rachel_Goldman
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

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).

Polen
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

Formatting in general would be a great addition too.

Ted_Pearlman
5 - Automation Enthusiast
5 - Automation Enthusiast

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

Craig_Parker
4 - Data Explorer
4 - Data Explorer

Definite must please.

Katherine_Duh
Airtable Alumni (Retired)

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()), “ :boom: ”, " ") which would return the :boom: emoji if the value in the “Due Date” column is earlier than the current date.

exploding due dates.png

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!

Polen
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

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.

Mike_Eovino
7 - App Architect
7 - App Architect

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.