One of the coolest features that really increases productivity and efficiency when dealing with large amounts of records is the “conditional formatting” feature in the Dynamics CRM Outlook client. Conditional formatting lets you build “rules” that change the way the record is displayed in a grid. I like this a whole lot. It doesn’t take the place of filtering, which limits the records based on user defined conditions, but rather changes the appearance of the records that are displayed in a list.
Let’s say you pull up your “My Active Accounts” view in Dynamics CRM. This view displays a list of all accounts that are assigned to you with a status set to “active”. This list of accounts can contain customers, vendors, suppliers, or any other designation you have set to segment you account list. Using conditional formatting, you can build a rule that changes the font, font size and color that display. For example, if you want to have all of the suppliers in the grid displayed with a font color of blue and vendors a color of orange, you simply create a personalization rule. This is done on the “view” tab at the top of screen and then you click the “view settings” button. Once the rule is saved, all the accounts in the view/list will have the appropriate colors applied, allowing you to quickly pick out vendors or supplieres in our example.
Another obvious use would be for viewing forecast or opportunity data. Simply create a conditional format rule to show opportunities with a probability of close greater than 80% to be green, 50%-79% yellow, and less than 50% red, and viola!!, a quick and easy colorful snapshot of your pipeline. The process to create these personalizations are very simple and I would say they are very similar to configuring “Inbox” rules you may have set up in Outlook.
So try it out…and let me know what you think!
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