Styling a Single Element in a Pgfplotstable

Question

According to the manual of pgfplotstable it is fairly easy to set the color of a whole row or a whole column of a table. However, I would like to style only one element located in a certain row and column.

There is \pgfplotstablegetelem{<row>}{<col>}\of{<table>} for accessing table elements.

I can style elements determined by their signs: columns/account1/.style={fonts by sign={}{\color{red}}}.

How can I style 22 in the following example identified by its row-columns-coordinates (colB,2)? This feature makes sense, if I load data from a file with plain data.

\pgfplotstabletypeset[col sep=&,row sep=\\,sci zerofill]{
  colA & colB & colC \\
  11   & 12   & 13   \\
  21   & 22   & 23   \\
}

Answer 1

pgfplotstable up to version 1.4.1 only supports row- and column styles. However, it allows to query the \pgfplotstablerow and \pgfplotstablecol macros, so you can use the (admittadly arkward) syntax

\pgfplotstabletypeset[
    columns/colB/.style={%
        postproc cell content/.code={%
            \ifnum\pgfplotstablerow=1 
                \pgfkeysalso{@cell content=\textbf{##1}}%
            \fi
        },
    },
    col sep=&,row sep=\\]{
  colA & colB & colC \\
  11   & 12   & 13   \\
  21   & 22   & 23   \\
}

what it does it to assign a post-processor for the complete column. But the column-specific post-processor checks the row index and applies the action only for row index 1 (indexing starts at 0).

It appears as if I have forgotten this particular feature. I have just added a new feature to pgfplotstable which implements that specific application in a much simpler way (by defining a every row <index> column <name or index>/.style). If you need such a thing very often, you may want to watch for the pgfplots unstable version on the pgfplots sourceforge web page, I will upload the changes in the next days.