Cross Doc data - adding Conditional Formatting

Showcase
1

I have two Docs:

  1. Students
  2. Meetings

In “Students” I have a table called “Student Master” that contains one row for each student, along with all their demographic data, etc.

In “Meetings”, I have created a “copy” of “Student Master” using Cross Doc. I also have a second table called “Meetings Master”. Each row of Meetings Master contains information about a meeting where a student was discussed. A field in this table is “Student Number” which is used to identify the student who was discussed in the meeting. There are also several formula fields in the Meetings Master table that use the Student Number to reference related fields from the Student Master Cross Doc table, such as “Team”, “Gender”, etc.

There are a few questions I’d like to resolve:

  • In the Student Master Cross Doc table, a given student’s team may be ‘7 Blue’. When it is displayed in the Meetings Master table, it shows up as ‘[7 Blue]’. Why does it add brackets when it is displayed as the result of a formula in the Meetings Master table?
  • When I apply a Conditional Formatting rule to the Student Master table (the one that was the result of the Cross Doc retrieval), it displays properly in the Student Master table, but the formatting doesn’t get inherited by the Meetings Master table (example: ‘7 Blue’ is colored blue in the Student Master table but ‘[7 Blue]’ in the Meetings Master table is not. Why not?

Note - none of the conditional formatting is being applied to the Cross Doc source table - that is straight text. I’m just trying to get it to look “nice” in the user-facing Meetings Master doc.

2

Hi @David_Lawrence,

We actually have a lot of conversations about this and are looking at ways to make this a little more intuitive. The issue you’re seeing is the difference between a single value and an array with a single value.

A != [A]

If you play with your formula for the one where you’re seeing brackets, adding First() or Last() to it will change it to a single value and won’t use brackets. This works well if your formula is always intended to only serve one value.

If you need a formula that can handle multiple values, using Contains() might be a better option for your conditional formatting filter.

And if you have a formula that creates nested arrays, using ListCombine() can flatten that list so that Contains() still works.

There is a lot here, and it’s not an easy problem for us to solve with the gigantic number of ways that data can be entered and be compared, but it’s on our radar and getting attention.

1 Like
3

Thanks, @BenLee. I added first() and that got rid of the brackets. Could you possibly take a look at my 2nd bullet? I’m still struggling with that one.
-D