Highlighting a single word in a different color in a cell

Erika Cilengir

Is there a way to highlight a single word (or words) in a differenet color in a cell?  Thanks!

Michael Bell

It appears that you can only Conditional Format the cell or the entire row, but not a word in a cell

Erika Cilengir

Thanks, Michael.  That would be a nice enhancement!

Travis

Currently, it's only possible to format all the text in a cell but I will add your vote for this enhancement request!

Erika Cilengir

Thank you, Travis!

Noah

Has this moved up the list of "nice to have"?

 

I use the last collumn of my project sheets to show updates of a specific task or group of tasks and would like to highlight specific updates. It seems people are trained to look for highlights and its hard to highlight specifics when a comments cell may have serveral comments in it...people do not know the important update without reading the whole cells content.

Michael Bell

IF you had a consistent word you were looking for, you could create another column (and hide if needed) and use the formula =Find("Text",CellName)    command to find a specific text in another cell.  It would return a number of where that word starts.  You could then conditional format based on if you received a number back or if it gave you a zero, the word is not there.

 

 

Noah

Thanks for the work around which might be useful down the road. However, the only downfall would be that I would have to use a consistent word to make this useful…though not the end of the world this is not ideal. Sometimes I would like to highlight a date or random words.

Travis

Noah, this has not been added to our near term road map (https://www.smartsheet.com/product-roadmap). I will add your use case to our enhancement request list, which our Product team uses when developing new features. 

Barry Weiss

I strongly second this functionality.  It is one of the barriers my organization has to using Smartsheet.  Not being able to independently format single words with in cells in Smartsheet is keeping folks using Word.  Please add this basic functionality to Smartsheet.

Thank you.

Travis

Thanks for the post, Barry. I will add your vote! 

Noah

Thanks for the followup Travis!

Michael Hull

I am building a schedule and I want to have a color coded legend: Green W for working, Another color for T (travel) and DO for Day Off. I would like to set the formatting so the cell is filled based on whether it has W, T, or DO. Conditional Formatting will do it but I have to make 90 rules for a 30 day month.

Bob Andrews

Michael, unless I am misunderstanding what you are asking - you only need to set three rules, not 90. 

 

A conditional formatting rule is applied to an entire sheet, not just a row or task.

 

This example would apply the rules you are asking for, to an entire sheet:

 

Michael Hull

In the example screenshot you posted above it says "apply this format to the "Status Column"....that is one column. I want to apply it to the entire sheet (calendar) say 30 days, times the 3 possible statusus, W, T, or DO. 3 x 30 columns = 90. When I do conditional formatting I am forced to select a single column or row and cannot even do more than one row at at time. The screenshot is what I want but I have to just manually color the cells which is why the question.

Bob Andrews

Thanks for the screenshot - it helps! 

 

You are correct, in your case it would take that many rules. You probably have a system that works but you might consider changing the format of your sheet.

 

Smartsheet handles dates pretty well. You might add a Date column, where you list each day as a new row, then move all your row descriptions to a single row. So flip flop the current set up. This would utilize build in Date handling and would require less rules.