Please support colored dropdown pills consistently across Table view, reports, and dashboard report widgets.
We are building an executive program management dashboard with a live Benefits Realization scorecard. Our Benefits Register uses colored dropdown pills for realization status, target approval status, and measurement readiness. Those pills did not carry through to the dashboard report widget with the same appearance.
To provide readable, color-coded statuses while preserving the register’s pills, we had to:
- Add three presentation-only columns to the source register.
- Populate those columns with live column formulas referencing the original status fields.
- Apply separate conditional-formatting rules to the presentation columns.
- Change the existing report to display those columns instead of the original dropdown fields.
- Turn off “Remove formatting” in the dashboard widget.
- Hide the presentation columns in the register and adjust report widths and widget sizing.
This preserved live data and avoided manually maintained duplicate assessments, but added columns, formulas, and formatting rules solely to reproduce presentation already available in the source sheet. The dashboard still displays filled rectangular cells rather than the original rounded pills.
Requested improvement: Let reports and dashboard report widgets inherit dropdown labels, colors, and pill styling directly from the source, with an option to preserve that appearance. Controls for alignment, padding, wrapping, and row height would also help create readable executive scorecards.
This would reduce maintenance and keep dashboards visually consistent with the sheets feeding them, without requiring helper columns or static images.
Is this capability planned, or is there a supported approach that avoids additional presentation columns?
