Date of release of Column formatting in SP Online Modern experience

[pierre david]

Hello,

Have received a mail about a new feature : Column Formatting on modern experience Lists.

But I see nothing in my First Release Tenant.

Did I look at the good place ?

If I'm good, do you have a date for this feature ? I saw that custom forms with PowerApps was delayed, perhaps the same ?

Thanks

[#2 · Accepted solution]

AFAIK, the roll-out is still being done by Microsoft but we don't have specific dates about when the roll-out will reach your tenant

[#3]

Greetings @pierre david!  How did you create that black bar that goes across the top of your site?  (any links or how-to guides?)  We are interested in creating a similar navigation bar across the top of some of our modern sites.  

[#4]

Just some custom CSS on the top navbar.

The trick is to use SPFX, the Sharepoint Framework to load the good custom CSS.

A link to begin :

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/sharepoint-framework-overview

Not so easy to create the first one, but after two or three, it's easier.

[#5]

I had the option for custom formatting the other day but no longer do.  Hmmm......... I wonder if they backtracked at all.

[#6]

Any update for this formatting feature ?

[#7]

Hi all, rollout of column formatting has begun.  First release users are beginning to get the feature now.  All first release users will have it by middle of next week, and it will begin rolling to first release tenants.

[#8]

Column formatting should now be in 100% production.

[#9]

Really like the idea behind this feature, albeit a little tricky to play with the json. Not really a general user feature, perhaps a GUI one day? PowerApp editor?

Couple of things I have noticed:

1. When formatting a Date, to go red when overdue, one of other my fields a calculated date one changes its format to UTC format. Which for general users is not really that readable.
2. When clicking on the column, there used to be an edit menu item, this allow a person to change the setting on the field without needing to go into Library or List settings (the old SharePoint, way of doing it) which was less intimidating for new users.
3. The schema file ("$schema": "http://columnformatting.sharepointpnp.com/columnFormattingSchema.json") is missing some syntax for operators ... "?" being a key one. 
4. Using the $Fieldname, it took me a bit to figure out that spaces in the field name are put in as _x0020_ be good to put that in the documentation.

[#10]

NOTES ON LOOKUP COLUMNS

1. Depending on where you look, the documentation on accessing lookup column values isn't consistent.
   
   
   • "[$AssignedTo.title]"     --    correct
   • "[$AssignedTo].title"     --    incorrect (the right bracket is in the wrong spot)
     
     
2. For people columns, the lookup data you want to retrieve IS LOWER CASE.  Even though the documentation gives an example, it can be easy to overlook because of how we all references lookups in the past whit People columns. 
   
   
   • "[$Manager.title]"     --    correct
   • "[$Manager.Title]"     --    incorrect ('Title' should be 'title')
   • "[$Manager.email]"     --    correct
   • "[$Manager.Email]"     --    incorrect ('Email' should be 'email')

[#11]

Hey all, Microsoft promised at Ignite that column formatting will evolve in the future so customization will be possible without having to deal with JSON.  What I think is very important is to fix documentation problems identified here cc @AaronMi @Lincoln DeMaris

[#12]

You may be able to do it with SPFx Extensions / ApplicationCustomizer (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/spfx/extensions/get-started/using-page-placeholder-w...).

[#13]

Thanks everybody for pointing out errors in our documentation.  These have been corrected.

[#14]

There's nothing more frustrating than working on stuff like this and getting nowhere because the documentation was wrong.  That said, I completely understand, having creating far too many documents with erroneous steps myself.  Ugh, nobody likes creating documentation (I suppose there are a couple people on planet earth that do.... somewhere).

[#15]

Thanks for doing that ... the json parses better now :)