Row coloring is one is my second most favorite feature in Maximizer CRM 11. One thing that you cannot do, however, is set a row coloring based on ranges. If I wanted to color all the opportunities that have a projected revenue of something greater than $100,000 dollars for example, there currently is no way to configure this.

This leads me to my second most favorite feature in Maximizer CRM 11, the formula user-defined field. Formula user-defined fields allow you to take the value of one or more field, manipulate them, and display them in another user defined field. For example, if you wanted to create a "Revenue after tax" field that will subtract sales tax from the revenue, you can now do this by programming the formula field to calculate the tax and subtract this from the revenue.

So for coloring rules, the trick would be to configure an alphanumeric formula user-defined field that will take ranges of revenue and output a label for that range. In my next example, I'm going to create a formula field called "Opportunity Size" and have 3 opportunity sizes: small, big, and huge.

So here is how we would configure the formula field:

1. In the user-defined field setup screen, click Add to create a new user-defined field.
2. Name the field "Opportunity Size".
3. In the Type drop down, select Formula, then select Alphanumeric.
4. In the Return type drop down, select Alphanumeric.
5. In the Formula field, click the ellipses.
   
   Here is where the fun begins... But to make life easier, copy and paste the following couple of lines into the formula field.
   if ([Revenue] < 50000, "Small",
   if ([Revenue] < 100000, "Big","Huge"))
   
   The manual has lots of examples and the below snippet of code doesn't have anything that is not in the manual.
6. Click OK to complete the formula.
7. You may want to set the user-defined field to hidden, if you don't want to see it all the time in the list of user-defined fields. Otherwise, click Ok to complete creating the User-defined field.

Once you've created the user-defined field, look at the user-defined field for all your opportunities.  The opportunities all are classified as Small, Big, or Huge. You can put this formula user-defined field in your column setup just like any other user-defined field.

To create a coloring rule:

1. Name the coloring rule "Color by Size".
2. In the Match entries using this field area, select the Opportunity Size field we created.
3. Add criteria for the Small, Big, and Huge. Now be aware that these are free-form text typing, but the beautiful thing about the formula fields is that since there is no user who is entering the data, and the field will always be Small, Big, or Huge. So make sure you type in Small, Big, or Huge correctly!
4. Once you've entered a value, change the text color and/or background color.

Once you're done, click OK and apply the Coloring rule to view your opportunities in Technicolor.