The request here is simple, and that is exactly why it exposes how unnecessarily complicated we have made spreadsheet work. A user with seven categories just wants to color entire rows by those categories, without building a dozen separate rules or clicking through menus all afternoon. They know it should be easy. They are right. The fact that this feels like a chore in traditional tools is not a sign of user error; it is a sign that the tool has stopped evolving.
What this person is describing is a conditional formatting task, but they are describing it the way a human thinks: "I have apples, make the row red." They do not want to write a formula that references a locked cell and then manage a rule manager that hides the logic three layers deep. They want a direct, visual mapping between category and color. That is not a luxury feature. That is the baseline expectation for anyone who has ever looked at a list of a few hundred rows and needed to make sense of it at a glance. The pain here is not the formatting. The pain is that the tool forces you to translate a simple idea into a rigid, abstract system.
The practical takeaway for anyone reading this is that you should not accept that friction as normal. When you find yourself building workarounds for what should be a straightforward task, that is a signal that the tool is working against you, not with you. The user is not asking for anything exotic. They are asking for a workflow that matches the way they already think about their data. That is the bar. And it is a low bar that most spreadsheet software still manages to trip over.
For us, the point is not to defend any particular product or version. It is to say that if you have ever abandoned a formatting idea because the setup was too tedious, you have already learned the lesson. The question is whether you will act on it. The next time you are about to manually color rows one by one, stop and ask why that is the best option. Then go find a tool that lets you pick a category, pick a color, and move on with your day. That is not a compromise. That is the minimum.