Highlighting Parent Rows of a List

[ChrisAHeathcote]

You may wish to highlight the parent or total of a list when displaying data on a board or worksheet. 

Conditional formatting uses line items to set the criteria for the conditional formatting and it is not possible to specifically highlight a summary or parent list item directly. 

However, the following steps can be taken to achieve this.

1. For the list in question ensure that you have created a properties module.
2. Create a new line item and format as a Boolean. Set the formula = TRUE
3. Create a new line item in the target module. Set the formula = IF Property module.boolean = TRUE THEN 0 ELSE
4. Change the summary settings for the line item to formula. All parent list items for that list will now be set to 1 while all the children remain 0
5. In the UX pivot the line items to either the column or row, select and update the conditional formatting settings using the line item above to qualify the criteria. 

This is a very simple solution which will allow you to highlight any parent of a list and can be repeated over any number of dimensions if you module requires it. 

Chris 

[JaredDolich]

Hehehe, @ChrisAHeathcote Brilliant!

This is a gold nugget. Thanks for sharing this. I literally had a client ask me this last week.

[PhilippErkinger]

This is a fantastic feature for pimping reports and it works perfect as long as it's a normal list, an even composite list or a line item subset. Unfortunately "Formula" as summary is somehow not always working smoothly with Ragged Hierarchies. As a result you will get the weirdest Error message Anaplan has in it's repertoire (see below). Do you know what is influencing it?

EDIT: It seems to be connected to this: Idea Exchange