Conditional formatting disappearing when a spreadsheet is saved as a template is a real frustration, and it points to a deeper problem with how traditional tools handle rules that are meant to be reusable. This isn't a user error or a quirk of sharing documents across two SharePoints, it's a fundamental limitation of the spreadsheet format itself.
The user who posted this question did everything right. They set up clear conditional formatting rules that change a row's color based on status: pending, complete, or cancelled. It worked perfectly in the original sheet. Then they saved it as a template, and the rules vanished. That gap, between a working document and a broken template, is exactly where legacy tools fall short. The logic is there, but the format can't preserve it reliably across file types. For anyone managing workflows in an organization, this isn't just an inconvenience. It means every time you reuse a template, you're rebuilding intelligence that should have been saved with it.
What makes this particularly telling is the user's instinct to blame the infrastructure. They wonder if two SharePoints are causing the issue. That suspicion is understandable, but it misses the real culprit. The file format itself, whether .xlsx or .xltx, was never designed to carry forward the kind of dynamic, rule-based logic that modern work demands. Conditional formatting is a layer of instructions applied on top of cells, not a native property of them. When you save as a template, that layer often gets stripped or corrupted, especially when the rules reference entire rows or rely on formulas. The user's intermediate-level expertise is enough to set up the rules, but not enough to know they're fighting the tool's architecture.
The practical takeaway is this: if your workflow depends on conditional formatting that survives reuse, you need a tool that treats rules as first-class citizens, not afterthoughts. AI-native spreadsheets can store formatting logic as metadata alongside the data itself, so it persists whether you're saving a template, sharing across environments, or opening the file in a different app. Until then, users like pompompossum will keep rebuilding the same rules every time they start a new project, and that's time they could have spent analyzing the data instead of fighting the format.