In this post we will demonstrate using the Conditional Formatting feature of SharePoint Designer 2010 to highlight items in a discussion board that have received a new reply within the past two days.  First, we will need to create a calculated date column in our discussion board to compare the current date to.    Suppose we have the following discussion board:

For this post, I will call this column “Highlight Threshold”, set it as a Date and Time column with a Date Only format.  For the formula, we will be adding two days to the existing “Last Updated” column, as this is the column that updates upon receiving a new reply, not the Modified column.  Note that this column must appear in the view, or the conditional formatting will disappear.

Now let’s open up SharePoint Designer 2010 and open the site this discussion board lives on.  From here, click on “Lists and Libraries” and then click on your discussion board in the main pane.  Right-click the “Subject” view and select “Edit File in Advanced Mode”.

Click anywhere inside the web part displaying the list while in “Design” mode.    Select Format Row from the Conditional Formatting drop down that now appears in the ribbon:

A Condition Criteria dialog box will now appear.  For the “Field Name” entry, choose our newly created column “Highlight Threshold” from the drop down options.  By default since this is a date column, “[Current Date]” appears as the Value we are comparing against.  This is what we want.  Click on “Equals” in the “Comparison” field to turn this field into a drop down menu.  Select “Greater Than or Equal” and click on “Set Style”.

Here, we will set the background to yellow by clicking on Background on the left pane, and choosing yellow from the background-color drop down.

Upon hitting OK, refresh the discussion board and you should see any recently replied-to posts highlighted in yellow.

By: Kathryn Bartlett