Conditional formatting for parent/child Kanban cards

DeeJayKay

I have three parent sections and each has a few children. I'd like to have the conditional formatting of the task bar be different so if something is under Parent 1, it's got an orange card etc. I can't find a way to do that so it's automatic for all new rows added under a parent and would hate to add a repetitive column. Any ideas? I'd like the condition be "if parent contains ABC, the format is orange task bar"

Thanks in advance for suggestions. 

Deborah

Chris McKay

Hi Deborah,

Unfortunately Smartsheet's conditional formatting lacks the ability to programatically define formats, instead relying on values in existing columns.

The good news is that what you're looking to achieve is possible. The bad news is that that unless your child rows can be identified as child rows of parent ABC via a value somewhere in the row, you're out of luck. Which means adding a column unfortunately,

First, add a [Parent] column and place the following formula in it:

=IF(COUNT(PARENT([Task Name]1)) > 0, PARENT([Task Name]1), "")

It will check the [Task Name] column (assuming this is where your description/name is located) to determine whether the row is a parent or child and if it is a child, will pull the [Task Name] value for the parent row. You can then use this to apply conditional formatting.

The only caveat is that for some reason only apparent to the Smartsheet product team, the application will not let you conditionally format Gantt bars for parent tasks. You could always apply conditional formatting to the entire row (as per my image) to get a pretty well formatted Kanban that also translates well into a traditional project plan.