Countdown Configuration

The Countdown is an easy way to use today’s date to show a count down to a date. It can also be used as a count up, like “Days since invoice”. It can also ignore the current date altogether and just show the the difference between two dates.

In the first section you choose the columns you want to use:

If you include [Today] (the current date/time) it will tell you at the bottom if you’ve created a count up or down, or you haven’t it’ll tell you you’ve created a time difference display.

Next, you can choose which views to add the column to; more information can be found on the Views manual page.

The Display section is where you choose how the column should be displayed on the page:

• Style: Choose the description length that suits your needs best, bearing in mind the amount of space that will be used on the page (the Preview is useful to judge this). The abbreviated option (“5d 11h”) is a good mix of compact and readable in most circumstances.
• Text color: Sets the color of the text on the page. Settings this to ‘None’ using the ‘Clear’ option on the color picker sets the text back to the default SharePoint color.
• Content: The nest of check-boxes at the bottom of the Display section allow you to choose what parts of the date/time difference to show. Unchecking all the options defaults the display to ‘Days’, which will be reflected in the preview.

Additionally, the Countdown also assumes you always want to show the date/time parts between the largest and smallest selected. For example, selecting only ‘Years’ and ‘Days’ will cause ‘Months’ to also be shown. Again, this will be shown in the Preview.

Finally, the Rules sections is where you can add conditional cell highlighting, and in Advanced mode also alter the values displayed. See the Rules page for further details.