Symbol Flexibility - more symbol colors

RB UMC

The ability to build our own Symbol Sets for a drop-down menu (even just using the pre-existing individual symbols, not creating a custom symbol itself) is a desirable asset and would assist in various data management senarios that require the use of more than four or five categories of classification

Adrian Mandile CHESS

Could we please add Symbol column-type with five colors options - Red, Yellow, Green, Blue (e.g. for 'not yet started') AND Gray (e.g. for 'n/a' or 'error')?

L_123

You can use the unichar/char lists. Build a table and use lookups and returns to choose from the hundreds of thousands of available symbols.

leross21

Right now, the colored dots range from green, yellow, red, gray/blue. I'd like to expand this to a set of 5 if possible for better communication in our tracker (different colors represent different stages within the process, etc.). We could easily even use upwards of 7 different colored dots, and custom colors would be best, but I know this would interfere with formulas which use these colors below.

Adrian Mandile CHESS

See also: Five color symbols — Smartsheet Community

Andrée Starå

Hi @leross21

I hope you're well and safe!

In the meanwhile, here's a possible workaround or workarounds

• You can use other symbols by using UNICHAR, CHAR or Emojis.

More info:

https://help.smartsheet.com/function/unichar

https://help.smartsheet.com/function/char

www.getemoji.com

A great resource that Paul Newcome put together

https://app.smartsheet.com/b/publish?EQBCT=82f8fe0936a54758a3afa4b584acde07

Would that work/help?

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Mike Wilday

A more creative workaround might be a creating your own flag with particular words like B Y G Gr Bl, etc. and then using conditional formating to color the cell based on the word or letter combos in the cell. Have you thought about that?

Mike Wilday

Here's an example

Andrée Starå

@Mike Wilday

Excellent option.

I'd also change the text, so it becomes "invisible".

Candice Kwiatkowski

On the same sheet, I have instances where a down arrow good (green) or bad (red). I would like to use conditional formatting to color code arrows appropriately, but the current Symbol column only allows for red/down green/up, or black arrows only.

Lori Cross

I think it would be great if we could have more than four colors in the symbol column type

Candice Kwiatkowski

Agree!! I have many different uses for arrows - would love to be able to choose their formatting!

isabonita

I would love to utilize the Symbol column type for custom symbols rather than creating a dropdown column.

OR if you guys could add a colored ball option that includes all 5 colors (red, green, yellow, blue, and gray)

Currently, we are using the symbol column and the colored balls max out at 4 (with 2 different color options) we really need to have 5 - and I would have to change the column type (which would may or may not break the reports and dynamic views) and make this a dropdown - which affects all of the existing formulas, filters, etc.

Julie Becker

https://community.smartsheet.com/discussion/comment/349212#Comment_349212

This is what i am doing now.. i have created many columns using emojis and its various symbols from this site (that was recommended from one of the Smartsheet Team Leaders in another thread) ----> https://emojipedia.org/objects

See images below or the two attached as examples

07-31-23 -68 (0126PM) Screenshot.png

07-31-23 -67 (0125PM) Screenshot.png

Kathy Nordeen

I would like the ability to have 5 colored circle symbols, Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and Grey.

Joseph Gasparro

More robust coloring of available symbols is a fundamental need. In this day, metric targets/trends are not simply down arrow is red and up arrow is green. Down green for lowering expenses. Up red for increasing expenses are two basic use cases. If you expect leaders to use dashboards, then out of the box functionality needs to be expanded. If you expect people to create their own solution, then what is the purpose of having a symbol column to start with?

It's all just a list of acceptable values for the column in some backend list anyway.