Automating the Formatting of Cell Hierarchy

Dereck H

Is there a way to automate the formating of your parent and child rows? If I have 4 layers of heiarchy (h1 > h2 > h3 > h4), is there a way smartsheet can automatically formate each layer of heiarchy? For instance, telling smartsheet to make the top parent rows (h1) BOLD at 16pt font while making all h4 child rows italicised at 8pt font. I find manually having to shift select each row and adjusts its parameters group by group is very inefficient and redudant, especially when you want to add new rows that don't start out with the same size/font/color formating you want the heiarchy to have, this is something that should be programed with presets.

Kennedy Stomps

Hi Dereck-- Great question! There isn't the ability to automate this formatting (without using a workaround) at this point, but I've added your vote for this to our enhancement request list.

 

In the meantime, you might consider using our new ANCESTORS() function to determine the hierarchy level of each row, then use Conditional Formatting rules to apply formatting based on the results of the function. You'll want to create a new column in your sheet, then add a ANCESTORS() function referencing your Primary column:

 

=COUNT(ANCESTORS([Primary Column]1))

 

This will count the number of parent row ancestors of a row, which will tell you how deeply nested in a hierarchy a row is. If the result is "blank", the row is the highest parent row. A value of "1" would mean the row has one parent, "2", a parent and a grandparent, and so on. You could then set up Conditional Formatting rules for each number needed. Hope this helps!