Conditional formatting in alerts

David Hull

How can I get conditional formatting to display consistently in messages sent through alerts? I have one sheet where this works well, and colour-coded rows appear as just as they do in the sheet itself. However, I have another sheet where only some of the formatting is shown, and none of the colour coding (which is based on the presence of a single character (A, O or null) in the first column of the sheet. In this latter example, one column appears coloured, which appears to bear no relation to any of the conditional formatting rules.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Genevieve P.

Hi David,

Change-based alerts will colour the cells of the row that were updated in bright yellow. For example, if you had alert to send out when a status is changed, then in the email that status cell would appear as bright yellow, but all the other cells in the row would not have any colour since they were not updated. If the alert was for when a new row is added, the entire row would appear as bright yellow. Does that fit with what you are seeing? If not, it would be helpful to see a screen capture of your sheet & a screen capture of how the alert is appearing in your email. (But please block out any sensitive data!)

Please also submit an Enhancement Request for having conditional formatting appear in email notifications.

Thanks!

Genevieve

David Hull

Hello Genevieve.

The alerts are time-triggered not change-triggered. The rows of the sheets are coloured based on data in one of the cells. In one sheet, the email alerts come through with the rows coloured as per the conditional formatting in the sheet; in the other sheet, they don't - but they go pick up a small element of some of the conditional formatting (see the emboldened text in the second image below).

Genevieve P.

Hi David,

Thanks for this additional information! The screen captures help a lot, I can see what you mean. Based on this it looks like some of the colours are from manual adjustments and some use Conditional Formatting rules, is that correct?

I've just tested and if a sheet has manual formatting, such as clicking specifically on a column and then highlighting the background of cells, this will show up in the alert. However if the formatting is set by Conditional Formatting rules, this won't pull through in the Alert, as you have found.

From what I can see in your first screen capture, someone must have manually bolded the top line which is why it's pulling through in the Alert. If you want to bring more of the formatting in through the to the alert, you can highlight rows and manually apply formatting.

This being said, I don't know if this is expected behaviour or not. Please submit an Enhancement Request as I noted above, but you may also want to open Support Ticket, providing them the details of this post so they can look into this further for you.

Hope this helps!

Genevieve

David Hull

Hello Genevieve.

All of the rows have conditional formatting on them, but it's possible that someone used manual formatting when they set the sheet up, then reinforced this with conditional formatting later.

I'll experiement, but pulling formatting through on alerts would be a very useful enhancement. I'll submit a request as suggested.

Thanks,

David

Jackson Pavelka

@David Hull - Did you submit this request? If not, I will do so.

David Hull

Hello @Jackson Pavelka .

I don't now recall whether I submitted an enhancement request or not - so please do so!

Thanks,

David