Conditional Formatting Columns in SharePoint

When working with SharePoint lists there are cases when you need to create a better visualization of data by using Conditional Formatting. Some of these cases would be to make overdue items in red or to highlight items based on their status.

To do this in SharePoint Online, lets start with a simple example of a task list. To keep things simple and focus on understanding conditional formatting the list has only 3 columns.

• Title – a text field
• Due Date – a date field
• Status – a drop-down with Open, Closed, Pending

Let’s format by Status first. Let’s mark all the Open Items in Green, all the Pending items in Yellow and all the Closed items in Gray

To do that, start by clicking on the Column Name and open the sub menu Column Settings. Click on Format this column

You now get the option to choose a template, or to edit the template and use your preferred colors.

This is the standard template

and these are the options for changing the color if you click Edit Template.

So let’s choose the colors as intended. And there it is.

If you try this for a date column, SharePoint would recognize it as a date and give you the option to format based on a specific date.