Is there a way to highlight a row in a view to emphasis active tasks?

[swoerle]

Hi all – 

My team is struggling how to quickly scan a list of tasks within a project and see which ones are active and ready to be worked on at a given time. 

Is there a way to do this? Perhaps with Conditional Formating when creating a view?

Thanks in advance!

[Heather_Kulbacki · Accepted solution]

Yes, there are a couple of options

• you can add a column for Task >> Can Start, then in Advanced Options > Column Rules, you can add a rule for when Can Start is True and Show an icon there - flags, circles, or smiley faces
• You could also choose one of your existing columns, maybe task name and add a Rule for when Task >> Can Start is True and change the text color of whatever is in that column

[Heather_Kulbacki]

You may want to add 2 rules - first a rule for when a task is complete - then the rule for when a task can start

Otherwise all those tasks that were ready to start and are now complete, show the can start icon or color

[swoerle]

Thanks @Heather_Kulbacki. This is exactly what I was trying to figure out. 

Is there a way to determine the order the rules get applied in? For instance, first I built a rule to highlight active rows green on my Can Start column. Second I built a rule that turns the row grey once PercentComplete reaches 100%. The first rule seems to over rule the second. Is there somewhere to control that?

[Heather_Kulbacki]

What it seems like to me - and I haven't tried to dig up any documentation, so I'm just guessing - it applies the first rule first and if that applies, it doesn't apply the second rule unless something changes and it looks at that task again.

So I think you'd want your PercentComplete = 100% rule first

[Madalyn_Destafney]

You're correct, Heather, that conditional formatting rules are applied top to bottom. 
@swoerle you could also apply the conditional formatting to the entire row or just to the cell you're focusing on.