It seems like conditional formatting in the Microsoft CRM Outlook Client is almost everyone’s favorite feature. I mean, how could you not love it? Drawing attention to the things you care about makes you want to use CRM because it makes your life easier. But I sense some curiosity out there about it. How do I create my own rules? Can I share my conditional formatting rules with other users? What if I want to add conditional formatting to a Server View? I’ll try to answer those here.
Since this feature is completely new for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, let’s walk through an example. Let’s say I’m looking at “My Active Accounts”:
I right click on the column and select “View Settings” (also available from the ribbon in Outlook 2010)
From there I see the Outlook view settings dialog:
I press Conditional Formatting button, and now I see the rules:
Let’s add a new one. Say we wanted to show all Accounts in this view that have Annual Revenue of one million dollars or more show up as large, bold, and red. I press “Add”, give the rule a name, and select the font I want:
I then click on the condition button to add in my rule. Move to the advanced tab, and select the field that you are interested. All CRM Fields will show up in the “User-defined fields in folder” flyout. (‘User-defined fields in folder’ is Outlook-speak for “Non Outlook Fields”)
I select “Annual Revenue (number)” as my field, because I want to look at the actual number value of the ”Annual Revenue” field in CRM, in this case “1,000,000”
I press “Add to List”, click Ok until I get back to my Accounts folder, and voilà!
A few notes: You can save the rules you create to your view in the same way you usually do. Plus, if you share out this view with others, they will get your formatting as well!
And for you customizers out there, if you have permissions to edit System Views, you can add conditional formatting to those views in the same way, and all the users who use that view will see the conditional formatting you created! And, naturally, when you export these system views as part of a solution definition, the same conditional formatting rules will light up those views once the solution is deployed.
Make sense? Any questions? Let me know! Be sure to check out the video of Nikhil and I discussing these features, and more!
Cheers,