ColumnFormatter Build and Installation

[Thalatta00]

Category

• Question
• Bug
• Enhancement

Expected or Desired Behavior / Question Context

Topic: Installing ColumnFormatter

Context / what I'm actually trying to achieve (in case there's a better way):
I'm a SharePoint newbie, and I'm trying to make some improvements to an internal process at my place of work that uses SharePoint heavily, but has relatively little development thus far (think: Form responses --> SharePoint List w/ default formatting --> that's it). I'm trying to do some slightly more in-depth editing than what's available in the SharePoint formatting GUI, but I don't really know JSON (yet), and since it's not technically part of my job to learn (even though I plan to do so eventually), I'm trying to make use of existing wizards & templates to save time.

My understanding from reading the setup guides was that I need to install the ColumnFormatter App add-in on the SharePoint site in question (possibly with the help of an admin), but we had a little confusion during the process of getting approval to install. I have permission to install it as a standalone or local-machine-only app-- is this possible? What are the prerequisites for setting this up, aside from Office 365? (ie. Do I need to go through the steps of creating a SharePoint Framework development environment, or can I run it without that? Do I need to install gulp if I'm using the pre-built package?)

Observed Behavior

I tried to build the package with npm install and gulp serve, but I got a lot of warnings about deprecated modules, and it eventually failed. I can provide the terminal output & debug log if necessary-- leaving them out for the time being because they're very long & I suspect they're not actually relevant to the question at hand.

Thanks in advance for your time and patience! :)