In my view, among the many great features of OnePager, none beat Conditional Formatting. With Conditional Formatting, you can create rules to change the color, shape, fill, and other properties of tasks and milestones based on specific rules that you set. However, what happens when you have multiple values to which you need the same rule to apply? You could create a bunch of separate rules, but that’s a lot of work. In this article, we will go over how you can create a conditional formatting rule that tests for multiple conditions at once.

Imagine with me, if you will, that you have a schedule with individual resources assigned to different tasks. Each resource is part of a specific team in your organization, and you would like to be able to color tasks based on the team that the people belong to, not based on their individual names.

To do this, we can go to Chart Properties > Task Bars > Manage Rules to set up our rules in Conditional Formatting. You can pick Resource Names in the Field dropdown and Contains as the Operator. In the Value field, instead of having a separate rule for each person on the team, we can enter the names for all members of each specific team into a single conditional formatting rule using a comma-separated list. Once finished, you can select which settings you want for each rule and then hit OK.

Instead of having twelve different conditional formatting rules, the comma-separated list lets us reduce the rules to only three — one for each team.

You will see that the tasks are now colored based on the rules that we set: yellow tasks represent the Production team, blue represents the Engineering team, and green represents Contractors. Even though the resources were assigned individually in the original project plan, conditional formatting lets us assign colors based on the overall team:

Pretty powerful, right? Do you have a different use case for comma-separated lists in your conditional formatting rules? If so, feel free to add it as a comment below.