Setting Row and Column Formats in SharePoint Online with PowerShell

I’m currently spending most of my time working in Office 365, in particular SharePoint Online (along with Microsoft Flow and PowerApps). While the new modern page look is a major improvement on the classic SharePoint on-premise look, customers still want to be able to customize the default look.

To allow customisation of how lists and libraries appear, Microsoft allows you to set view formatting. This uses a JSON object to describe how elements are displayed when a row is loaded in a list view. A useful repository of open source JSON formatting samples is available at https://github.com/SharePoint/sp-dev-list-formatting.

Similarly, you can apply a JSON object to customize how a field (column) is displayed in a list view. Note, neither row or column formatting changes the data in the list item or file; it only changes how it’s displayed to users who browse the list.

While there is a lot of documentation around setting the JSON formatting using the SharePoint Online UI, there is little documentation around using PowerShell to do this. I came across this method of setting the JSON formatting object:

# Get the raw content for the JSON Definition
$listViewFormattingJSON = Get-Content -Raw -Path '.\ViewRowFormat.json';

# Update the List View Formatting Definition
$view = Get-PnPView -List $list -Identity $viewName
$view | Set-PnPView -Values @{CustomFormatter = $listViewFormattingJSON.ToString()}
Invoke-PnPQuery

And similarly, to set the column formatting:

$statusFieldFormattingJSON = Get-Content -Raw -Path '.\StatusColumnFormatting.json';
$statusField = Get-PnPField -List $ListName -Identity 'Status'
$statusField | Set-PnPField -Values @{CustomFormatter = $statusFieldFormattingJSON.ToString()}
Invoke-PnPQuery

These code snippets help to set the customized view below:

Note, I use the SharePoint Patterns and Practices (PnP) PowerShell library to provision and manage my SharePoint Online solutions.