Conditional Formatting - copy/paste or inherit?

I’d like the different tables to either inherit conditional formatting rules of the table they’re looking up from, or have an easy way to copy/paste those rules to another table. I have this vague memory of there being a checkbox to inherit conditional formatting rules but i can’t find that. Is there a way to copy/paste rules at least without having to manually do it each time?

Hey! Long time no see.

You can only inherit conditional formatting rules from the master table. If you make a view and apply conditional formatting to the view, then make another view and want to inherit conditional formatting from that view, tough luck because you can’t.

Sucks, I know. I wouldn’t want to conditional-format my master tables but keep them as bland as possible. However if I know that I’ll want to reuse the formatting across multiple views, I’ll go this route.

The setting is in Options -> Conditional formatting -> here:

You cannot copy the conditional formatting from one view and paste it onto another view either. But what you can do is copy-paste the formatted view entirely — this will copy the formats along. Then you can adjust the copied view to get the data set you desire. See for yourself what’s easier: to set up conditional formatting rules again, or to set up filters, columns, groups, sorting etc again.

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Hi Paul!

Thank you for this! This clarifies things. So if I have a field in the master table that is a lookup from a separate table, then in order to get the conditional formatting in both places I have to set it up individually on both tables. But if I want all views that reference that master table to have that conditional format then I can have them inherit. Is that right? Thank you!

Tim

I think we may be talking about different things.

If you have a table Tasks and a view My Tasks, then if you add conditional formatting in Tasks you can inherit it in My Tasks. But for any rules added directly to My Tasks, you cannot inherit them anywhere else. You can copy the My Tasks view and change the filters to make it a Done Tasks, for example. In this case all the rules on this view will be duplicated as well, and the Done Tasks will have the same set of rules as My Tasks (and inherited ones as well, if that’s turned on).

If you’re talking about the formatting of “reference pills”, i.e. these things:
image

then you do the conditional formatting or text formatting on those referenced rows, and enable this coloring on a column level (for all views of this table):

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