Control Center - Global Update for Conditional Formatting

Chizu Hieida

We would love to have the capability to push new conditional formatting using global update for provisioned project sheets. We have over 200 projects and whenever we get new ask for new conditional formatting (since things change all the time), it's a huge manual hours to go through and update each provisioned project with conditional formatting on source sheets.

jessica.smith

Yes, please add this feature. Such a time sink!

Joe Goetschel

Need it!!!

Jennifer Sloane

It's disappointing that this isn't on the horizon. If someone wants new conditional formatting or to change any conditional formatting across all projects - say, that everything with a due date in the past gets red text and we need to change it so that it only turns red if it's 3 days overdue - then we have to manually add this condition to every. single. project. sheet. from. scratch. that is several DAYS worth of work across all the sheets we use. being able to push out conditional formatting globally or to all sheets in a given folder or workspace would allow us to move ahead in about 5 minutes.

Tim Starkey

Big upvote from me on this. In general, I would love to see more "control" in control center. In theory, anything we can set in a sheet, would like to be able to adjust it in control center.

• Conditional formatting
• Base formatting (by column)
• Have it work with sheet summary fields
• Sheet automations / notifications

Anything that gets changed in the template and needs to be pushed out to all the provisioned projects. It would be awesome.

Here are some other posts addressing the gaps in CC ability to format/update sheets:

Control Center Global Update and adding a new external reference — Smartsheet Community

SCC Global Update - Add number formatting — Smartsheet Community

Control Center: Allow word wrap as a column option — Smartsheet Community

TBH, I have quite a few updates I would like to push out through CC, but have been holding off knowing that there will be gaps in what it can do, and there will be a lot of post push cleanup.

Jamie K

Yes we definitely need this!

SashaZ

Definitely need conditional formatting as a possibility for global updates.

LauraD

This!!! We use formatting to help indicate where information should be entered or where it is not needed. Updating each sheet takes forever!

Sherry Fox

I agree, this is a major need, and as part of the Enterprise package. I do not want to see a feature like this as part of the Premium packages. My company does not have the premium packages, so that means I am the one that does all the manual updates.

JUST PJM

This is an essential feature we would love to have in control center. If there are many projects it takes a lot of time especially as setting conditional formatting (sometimes multiple per sheet!). Updating conditional formatting is one of most time consuming activities. Control Center's essential feature is to reduce maintenance efforts on a portfolio level. So I am wondering that this is not yet part of the package. Definitely a must have requirements compared to new released features like AI, dashboard coloring, etc… A must have vote from my side. Thanks to the Smartteam product management for considering any implementation. To everybody that is using Control center→ Please vote for this feature

DrAlexH

Tech companies are going to be working with a progressively lower-skilled employee population. Further, the software landscape is moving faster than ever due to AI, among other things. Lower-tech-savvy folks need easier-to-use files for project management. Colors and conditional formatting are an enormous part of how we can do that for them. It liberates otherwise lower-tech-ability folks to have a WAY bigger impact in the world because they can now be a part of getting something to scale. (as opposed to in 2005… everyone was technical). This is good for the world. Join the movement, smartsheet!

Conditional formatting and making sheets/reports/tools easier to use, by accommodating them with on-demand company-wide changes that populate into all desired assets, by choice of the builder, would be such a gift.

Just today I'm facing having to spend 8+ hours rolling out formatting changes alone. Invariably there will be more improvements in formatting to be made in the future as I roll out the system to my teams. Having to do it sheet by sheet is an absurd cost for something so rudimentary.

I request that you do one or more of these, ordered from best-case to minimum necessary case:

1. Whole Org conditional formatting rules that can push to every sheet, with control as to what row of the conditional formatting dialogue box it should land in each sheet. The PPM specialist should have the ability to select single files, folders, and workspaces, by type and location, to push the formatting to, or to avoid pushing the formatting. Selectivity in what gets pushed and where it gets pushed to, would be so so valuable. I want this for 3 years from now.
2. For now, much of my pain would be solved with the ability to copy-paste formatting from one file and apply it to a similar file, either completely replacing the receiving files' formatting, or being additive to the existing formatting rules within it.
3. I could even benefit from just drag and drop functionality

I find it alarming and concerning that smartsheet does not have this feature. We've been using the tool for almost a year, and this week and weekend was the first time I pushed heavily to enhance my own working ability in smartsheet, and the team's productivity by overhauling much of our PPM system. I foresee many more such large builds as we scale. I may have to solve cop this problem by hiring VA's from overseas because the tedium of regenerating the exact same rules on countless sheet is going to drive me to insanity.

Smartsheet, please give us copy-paste functionality for conditional formatting. STAT! Folks have been asking for it since at least as far back as 2016. Here's just one of many:

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/67990/is-there-a-way-to-copy-conditional-formatting-from-one-sheet-to-another-using-api

DrAlexH

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/398149#Comment_398149

" - then we have to manually add this condition to every. single. project. sheet. from. scratch. that is several DAYS worth of work across all the sheets we use. "

== SUCH a waste of human capital in this world.

"…would allow us to move ahead in about 5 minutes." Yup.

And here I sit, as CEO of our company having fought with a similar problem. I am mind-blown.🤯🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️

There are a few UI pieces of smartsheet, that if done well (colors, formatting, basic appearance stuff) it would unlock smartsheet to the entire world of B2C SaaS companies like us, and it would become THE go-to PPM software for startups. But I suspect it's mostly B2B companies working in smartsheet because you just can't get talented consumer-facing folks to want to interact with software that induces so much setup time-waste and color/appearance-based headaches. I told my teams "don't touch it until I polish it" and it's been an entire week, mostly because of insufficient color choices and copy-pasting of conditional formatting.

James Cote

Ultimately, conditional formatting is a critical part of Smartsheet's usability, and not being able to push any updates to those settings places an unrealistic expectation for the original creator of a sheet set to foresee all future needs.

In my mind, one of the key benefits of the Smartsheet ecosystem is the ability to continually update processes to add features and increase efficiency. While building new tools, I had hoped that Control Center would allow me to collect user feedback from different groups, make updates based on that feedback, and then push those updates to the various groups using the tool.

Not being able to do that with conditional formatting leaves a huge gap, in my opinion.