ExtremeML now Supports Conditional Formatting

With most software projects, you only get out as much as you put in. Every feature that your application ultimately offers is the result of a conscious design decision, often followed by countless hours of development and testing.

ExtremeML is a little different, as it sometimes delivers features by surprise! This is because a template workbook used by ExtremeML may include any of Excel’s many hundreds of spreadsheet features, and they will always remain intact in the final output, even if ExtremeML doesn’t specifically include code to support them. A couple of good examples of this free functionality are shown in the pivot table and pivot chart tutorials, which “just work”, despite the fact that ExtremeML does nothing extra to support them.

Of course, this functional bounty sometimes leads to complacency, with the assumption that a certain feature “must work”, despite the fact that it hasn’t actually been tested. One such example is Excel’s conditional formatting feature, which enables worksheet cells to be dynamically styled according to rules applied to their content. I had long assumed that conditional formatting could be added to a template in the same manner as static cell styling and that it would similarly come to life at runtime. In fact, I was wrong, as I recently learned from a couple of users who tried to work with it.

Thankfully, after a little time spent understanding the inner complexities of conditional formatting in OpenXML, this feature is now implemented and available in the latest download.

To see how it works, here’s a quick tutorial.