With the release of the controversial new SharePoint Designer 2013, has the ever-popular Conditional Formatting option died a death?

Why is SharePoint Designer 2013 controversial?

The bee in everyone’s bonnet is SPD 2013’s lack of a Design View; one of the staple tools of every Designer user. The place to get up to speed on this topic is Marc Anderson’s article: SharePoint Designer 2013’s Missing Design View

How does this effect the Conditional Formatting option?

I asked the same question myself, so I installed SPD 2013 and gave it a try. After clicking, selecting, choosing, and swearing at pretty much every component I came to the conclusion that I was clearly missing something.

I posted on SPSE expecting a quick helpful pointer. Instead I was met by a resounding silence. After a suitable pause, I reposted onto MSDN, only to find that Conditional Formatting on list view web parts doesn’t seem to be supported anymore! Please feel free mock me mercilessly if this isn’t the case.

Of course it’s still possible to use it for other purposes, but formatting list views is the major purposes of that feature; it seems kind of pointless without it.

Is SharePoint Designer 2013 dead too?

It may still be early days, but when initially searching around for an answer, I was struck by how hard it was to find any blog posts about SPD 2013 (other than complaints about the Design View). For comparison, with the release of SPD 2010, the community was positively frothing over with articles and praise.

The same was true when posting on the forums: I leapt into the middle of the mainstream SharePoint 2013 river, expecting to be swept away by all the keen Designer users already trying out all the features. Instead I found myself sat in a rather shallow puddle.

So how can we apply Conditional Formatting in 2013?

Instead of wildly speculating on the popularity of SharePoint 2013’s tools, here are a couple of methods for working around the problem:

XSLT: It’s possible to create your own XSLT template by customising the default main.xsl, and then assigning it to the LVWP. I’ve searched high and low for a guide on how to apply conditional formatting using this method, with no success. Please let me know if you’ve seen such a thing.

Buying a solution: Inevitably the vulturous SharePoint software vendors have swept down on SPD 2013’s dying form, hoping to profit from its misfortune…

Oh! On an unrelated note; did I mention a new 2013-compatible version of SharePoint Highlighter has just been released? 😉

Tags: Conditional Formatting, SharePoint 2013, SharePoint Designer