Conditional formatting across documents

Question

I run several youtube channels and have an upload schedule for each. I also have a master schedule that shows uploads across all channels. Each of these are different sheets within separate documents and they can't be combined I've been manually changing cell colours (Red=planned, yellow=edited, green=live) and I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to link cells so when I tick a checkbox on the upload schedule it will change the cell colour on the master schedule. So if the "EDIT" checkbox is [TRUE] in document A then the cell colour will change from red to yellow in document B

Answer 1

If you have a lot of cells that should be conditionally formatted the best way to proceed is to create a Google Apps Script on edit installable trigger.

Start by reading

1. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/sheets
2. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers/installable
3. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/guides/triggers/events

If you have only few cells or you don't want to read the above or find it too complex / time consuming you might want to try first to use formula for conditional-formatting. You will have to use IMPORTRANGE to import the data from the spreadsheet with the checkboxes and if you add the IMPORTRANGE in not the sheet with the conditional formatting rules your conditional formatting formula should use INDIRECT.

Please bear in mind that IMPORTRANGE and INDIRECT will be recalculated frequently and this might affect your spreadsheets performance.

Resources

• IMPORTRANGE
• INDIRECT

Related

• How can I set conditional formatting on a particular cell that depends on another cell's value?
• Conditional formatting across sheets