Colors in Lotus Notes View Columns

I always wanted to document this, but often felt lazy about doing it. Thus this got delayed by almost 4 and half years. Can you believe that? I can. I know I am better at doing stuffs more worse than this.

This post is typically about how you give different colors to different columns in Notes Client. Actually there is no such thing. Hence as always we end up doing simple work arounds. Let me give you a visual sneak peak before you end up reading my entire post and feel bored

Thats looks color full doesn't it :). The trick behind these colored columns with custom backgrounds are using hidden columns with "Use value as colors" enabled with a column formula like

backgroundColor:textColor where each of these would assume a value between 000000 to ffffff or 0:0:0 to 255:255:255. Refer to following image for more details

If you take a closer look at the image, you will be able to see that I am referring to three small columns with no titles and the two important properties "Use value as color" and "Hide column" enabled.

Make a note of the way in which I had assigned the color values to the variables. They are not in quotes. I have assigned the numbers colon separated just as is. So these variables are typically arrays containing three color codes as its elements