Color Coding in Tables - allow coloring cell background

Color coding would be more effective if it could be applied to the cell background of a particular column (or entire rows).

Defining the foreground color of cell text could also be quite useful (as well as bold/italic) - e.g., rendering imminent dates in red for a Due Date column.

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Agreed. Strange though, I am fairly sure this has been discussed and requested before, but it doesn’t show up easily on a search.

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Not to beat a dead horse, but this is the third post I’ve made tonight re: repeated requests and lack of their organization. I too recall something about color-coding, I think, but at this point it takes a lot of time to try to go back and find that stuff. We have a lot of non-native English speakers in here, so perhaps it was described in a way neither myself nor you instinctively would type in the search. So again, I think this is an example of how it would be good to have the requests categorized or otherwise vetted when they come in…

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Related:

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Ahhh, there it is. :smiley:

Implemented in the latest release

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I’d like to revise this as I think what you’re talking about @Matt_Blais is something like in Asana where if there is a date column in a list, and the date is overdue, that date is shown in red. Not the entire row, nor the entire column. I was actually going to request this feature right now but you basically already hit the nail on the head. So hoping this request gets revised, since as far as I know the ability to do what you’re asking is not available yet.

Here is an example of how this looks in Asana:

Thanks!

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@B_Sp Yeah, my original request here is too old to edit, and due to its wording, it’s not a great post for the “customize foreground colors” request.

Seems to me like the original request basically encompasses this, doesn’t it?

Yeah, but the team already marked it “Done”, plus the Title only mentions “background”, so we probably need a new request to get it back on their radar.

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Hmm, where did they mark it Done though? This is still “open” and in the Ideas & Features category… I mean yes there is Michael’s post above:

But then why not actually Close the topic? :thinking:

This one is also still open:

Of the original request, I guess the bold part is done, but the rest is not.

Color coding would be more effective if it could be applied to the cell background of a particular column (or entire rows).
Defining the foreground color of cell text could also be quite useful (as well as bold/italic) - e.g., rendering imminent dates in red for a Due Date column

It might be worth splitting the request, but then again, I know some people think they don’t have enough votes to cast, so might be frustrating to have to use several votes for closely related features.
Ultimately, it’s most interesting to know what the thinking/use cases are for column-colouring vs cell-colouring and foreground-colouring vs background-colouring (other than personal preference :wink: )

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If the team can/will track ongoing, as-yet-unresolved interest with this still-open topic (which would be my preference), then let’s stick to that. :grin:

As to use case, the current coloring is workable, it would just be nice to have more flexibility, e.g. background color + text color (driven by different rules). Perhaps more particularly, to be able to specifically highlight the actual field where the “problem” (trigger) is, rather than the row/column. But it’s fair to say that for me coloring in table view is adequate as-is. I actually wish coloring in Lists could work more like that in Tables, but I guess that’s a different request. :wink:

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I think this is a great example Chris of why we could use more votes! @Matt_Blais described right here:

And I gave you guys an image of how that’s done in a popular app, Asana. I in fact came back here t revise this because I was testing in Asana and found that feature extremely useful, searched for it here in the community, and discovered that Matt had requested exactly that!

@Oshyan what exactly do you mean by lists? Collections in Entities (the original term for the area in entities where you see one-to-many relations that just got the update and has more stuff you can see in it now…

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By “Lists” I mean the standard “List” view type. This is what color highlighting looks like there:
image
It’s just the little colored bar. I would love to be able to actually have the entire task background colored, or something like that. The colored bar is just too subtle IMO.

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I second this suggestion. I have added my vote to the top of this post/suggestion.
Highlighting cells based on rules would be awesome. (Like in the Asana example)

Regarding the general color coding.
Color coding of specific columns in a table is an efficient way to get a quick overview of a table.
Can be used to highlight where to enter specific data or what other people should to pay attention to.

Manually setting the colors would be great.

Some inspiration:
My reference is Airtable.
They automatically color code the background of the columns that are used for sorting or filtering. This is very useful. But being able to set it manually would be even more desirable.

The custom color coding they offer is only applied to the far left of the table rows. Similar to what you offer right now.

See examples here: Image 1-3-2023 at 1.14 PM

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