Mastering conditional formatting in Lucidchart makes monitoring and interpreting your data
easier than it’s ever been so that you can spend less time combing through spreadsheets,
and more time innovating.
In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to create rules for conditional formatting in Lucidchart
so that you can change your shape’s appearance, trigger icon sets, or change line styles based
on your data.
For this tutorial, we’ll be using this diagram that I created to see each member of my team
and what segments they’re assigned to.
In addition to their regular job duties, each member of my team works on a special project
each quarter.
I want to be able to quickly reference not only what each person’s role is, but also
what project team they’re working on this quarter.
I’ve listed the special projects for the quarter in the legend in the bottom left corner
of my diagram, and now I want each of these colors to correspond with the team members
working on that specific project.
I have all of this data outlined in a Google Sheet, which I’ve already imported into
Lucidchart and linked to each shape in my diagram.
(If you want to see how to link data to shapes, check out our video on Data Linking by clicking
the link at the top of the video, or in the description.)
So now let’s look at how I can use conditional formatting to easily visualize who’s on
each special project.
Once you have data linked to the shapes or lines in your diagram (which you can learn
how to do in our Data Linking video), click on the wand button at the bottom of the dock
to access the tools for conditional formatting.
We’ll start by making a new rule by selecting the +rule button at the top of the panel.
As you can see, we have two initial options; we can choose shape formatting and have our
shape change colors or change the border style, OR we can choose icon set and have our data
trigger the appearance of various icons.
We’ll look at both of these in this video, so let’s start with shape formatting.
Our next decision is choosing what information will activate our formatting.
If we choose “text,” Lucidchart will read the shape or line text and make formatting
changes based on the mere presence of text, or the appearance of certain words.
Alternately, we can choose “shape data” and base our formatting on any of the variables
included in that shape’s data.
We’re going to choose shape data, then tell Lucidchart to look at the information in this
“Special Projects” field.
Next, we have a lot of options to choose from.
For our example, we just want to know if this field contains a keyword for each of our special
projects.
This first one will look for the word “automation” which is part of our primary special project.
If Lucidchart finds that keyword in the shape data, then I want it to change the fill color
of the shape to this light blue color, and give the shape a bold blue border.
If we wanted to customize a line, we could set the properties for that here as well.
Okay, so now let’s test this.
I’m going to select everything in my diagram by using the keyboard shortcut CMD+A, then
I’m going to drag this new rule onto the canvas and apply it to all of these shapes.
And now I can see which team members are on the special project working on automation
and augmentation.
Awesome!
To create the rest of our rules, we can use the duplicate feature here in the more commands
menu of the rule.
This will copy this rule exactly, and then I can change the word we’re searching for
in this rule and the color of the formatting.
Let’s go ahead and create rules for each of the special project teams.
Now, I can select all of the objects on the canvas and drag each of these rules onto them,
or even just drag them up to the top portion of the conditional formatting panel, and I
can instantly see what special project each team member is assigned to.
When I click on any one of of my team members, I can see what conditional formatting rules
have been applied here in the top portion of the conditional formatting panel.
If I want to remove a rule, I can click on the three dot button on the far right edge
of the rule and choose “unapply.”
When I do, that rule gets sent down in the “other rules” section of the panel.
That way I can still apply it to other shapes, or adapt it and re-apply it to this shape.
You’ll notice that I also have options here to reorder my rules.
The order of your rules is extremely important.
Which we’ll talk about in our next example.
Let’s dig a little deeper by creating some more complicated conditional formatting rules
in this network diagram.
Imagine that we want to quickly get an idea of the types of instances that exist in our
network.
Larger instances are more expensive to run, so I want to see if there are any instances
I should explore to see if we can optimize our budget.
I could review each instance one by one, but that would take a lot of time.
Instead, I’ve used Lucidchart’s AWS import to visualize my network, and now I want to
use conditional formatting to see relevant instances at-a-glance.
Let’s start by clicking the conditional formatting button here at the bottom of the
feature dock.
Now click Create New Rule.
This time we’ll format our document using an icon set.
Lucidchart has several icon sets available to use and each set will have about 5 different
icons for you to use.
You may not need all of these icons, which is okay.
You can always turn off any that you don’t need.
For example, I only want to see instances that I need to take a second look at, so I’m
just going to change this Green Check icon to Not Used to turn it off.
Now, I’ll change the Yellow Notification icon from looking for shape text to shape
data.
I’ll look for any instances that contain the word “large”.
When I apply this rule, my diagram will instantly show me every instance that’s large.
Now, I’ll do the same for this Red X icon, except that I want to look for any instances
that are extra large.
Great!
Now I can use our select all shortcut from before and drag this rule directly onto my
network.
However, notice that all of the icons are Yellow Notifications.
That can’t be right.
Let’s take a closer look.
If I select this shape to the left, I can see that the icon is formatting correctly,
this is a large instance.
However, when I select the shape to the right, you can see that this shape is extra large.
What gives?
Remember when we told you before that the order of your rules was important?
This is why.
If we go back to look at the rule, you can see that since both instances contain the
word “large”, they trigger the Yellow Notification icon, since it is prioritized
in the queue.
However, I want to make sure we tag larger instances, so I’ll just drag that rule to
be more highly prioritized and now, see how the rule is immediately updated across my
document.
As you can see, conditional formatting is a powerful tool that allows you to get more
insights from working visually.
And after watching this video, you should be able to access those insights by applying
conditional formatting to your own documents in Lucidchart.
Check out some of our other videos about other ways you can apply more complex data-linking
and conditional formatting to the diagrams you need on the job.