In the old days (pre-Conditional Formatting), if I wanted to give a background color that would changed based on a field's contents, I would use a Calc field resulting in a container.

Let's say I have a layout with 30-35 of these fields, would conditional formatting be slower over a network than these calc fields?

IMHO it should be faster, because no field data (the graphic in the container) is being transferred between server and client.

I believe conditional formatting should be significantly faster. Container fields require passing actual pixel data, while conditional formatting is just a rendering instruction to be executed locally.

Note that this is a mere speculation, and needs to be tested. I would be VERY surprised if it didn't turn out to be true, but I have been surprised in the past when other plausible assumptions were refuted by testing.

Thanks for the thoughts.

This is for a Calendar, which has three different layouts for months with 4-6 weeks. I'll try it on one layout and see how it goes.