Text highlight in excel

To highlight text, select text by double-clicking the cell, then press left mouse and drag across the text. Select Font Color and choose a color. To create a highlight style, go to Home > Cell Styles > New Cell Style.

How do you quickly highlight in Excel?

Press and hold the Shift key on the keyboard. Press and release the Spacebar key on the keyboard. Release the Shift key. All cells in the selected row are highlighted; including the row header.

Where is the highlighter tool in Excel?

You find Excel’s highlight function under the “Conditional Formatting” button in the Styles section under the Home tab. When you click it, a drop-down menu appears with a “Highlight Cell Rules” option.

How do you highlight part of a text?

How to highlight text using your keyboard. To highlight with the keyboard, move to the starting location using the arrow keys. Then, hold down the Shift key, and press the arrow key in the direction you want to highlight. Once everything you want is highlighted, let go of the Shift key.

What is the shortcut key for highlight?

Adding highlighting: Select the text you want to highlight, then press Ctrl+Alt+H. Removing highlighting: Select the highlighted text, then press Ctrl+Alt+H.

How do you highlight yellow in Excel?

Create a cell style to highlight cells
Click Format. In the Format Cells dialog box, on the Fill tab, select the color that you want to use for the highlight, and then click OK. Click OK to close the Style dialog box. The new style will be added under Custom in the cell styles box.

How do you highlight in Excel using keyboard?

If your intention is to select all of the cells on the sheet, you simply press Ctrl + A a second time and your entire worksheet will be highlighted.

How do you highlight partial text in Excel?

1. Select the text list that you want to highlight the cells which contain partial text, and then click Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule, see screenshot: 2.

How do you highlight highlighted cells in Excel?

Select Visible Cells Only with the Go To Special Menu

1. Select the range of cells in your worksheet.
2. Click the Find & Select button on the Home tab, then click Go to Special…
3. Select Visible cells only…
4. Click OK.

What tool allows you to highlight?

You can highlight text in your document by clicking on the Highlight tool, located in the Font group on the Home tab of the ribbon. (In some versions of Word this tool is called the Text Highlight Color tool.) When you click the tool, the mouse pointer changes to show a highlighter pen symbol.

How do you highlight and copy text?

Start by selecting the first block of text with the mouse. Then, scroll to the next block of highlighted text and hold down the Ctrl key while you select that. Once you’ve selected all the blocks you want to copy, press Ctrl + C.

How do you color your text?

You can change the color of text in your Word document.

1. Select the text that you want to change.
2. On the Home tab, in the Font group, choose the arrow next to Font Color, and then select a color. You can also use the formatting options on the Mini toolbar to quickly format text.

How do I highlight a word in Word?

Use Word’s Find feature to highlight all occurrences of a word or…

1. Choose Find from the Edit menu or press [Ctrl]+F.
2. On the Find tab, enter the word or phrase into the Find What control.
3. Check the Highlight All Items Found In option (shown below).
4. Click Find All and click Close.

How do I highlight in Excel without a mouse?

If you hold down the shift key, and then press an arrow key, you can extend this selection in any direction without using the mouse. To select an entire column, press control-spacebar. Once you have the column selected, you can press shift and extend the selection to the right or the left using the arrow keys.

What are the 20 shortcut keys?

Basic Windows keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl+Z: Undo. No matter what program you’re running, Ctrl+Z will roll back your last action.
• Ctrl+W: Close.
• Ctrl+A: Select all.
• Alt+Tab: Switch apps.
• Alt+F4: Close apps.
• Win+D: Show or hide the desktop.
• Win+left arrow or Win+right arrow: Snap windows.
• Win+Tab: Open the Task view.

How do you highlight text that Cannot be highlighted?

Place the cursor near the text you need to copy. Then press the Windows key + Q and drag the cursor. You should see a blue box that you can now highlight the text by dragging the cursor.

How do you highlight cells with text?

Select the cells you want to apply conditional formatting to. Click the first cell in the range, and then drag to the last cell. Click HOME > Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cells Rules > Text that Contains. In the Text that Contains box, on the left, enter the text you want highlighted.

How do you highlight cells based on a list?

Highlight Items From a List

1. Create a list of items you want to highlight.
2. Select range A2:A7.
3. On the Ribbon’s Home tab, click Conditional Formatting, then click New Rule.
4. Click Use a Formula to Determine Which Cells to Format.
5. For the formula, enter.
6. Click the Format button.
7. Select a font colour for highlighting.

How do I highlight multiple values in Excel?

Highlight Rows Based on a Multiple Criteria (AND/OR)

1. Select the entire dataset (A2:F17 in this example).
2. Click the Home tab.
3. In the Styles group, click on Conditional Formatting.
4. Click on ‘New Rules’.
5. In the ‘New Formatting Rule’ dialog box, click on ‘Use a formula to determine which cells to format’.

How do you highlight text using the keyboard?

If you want to highlight one word at a time, hold down Ctrl + Shift , then press the left or right arrow key. Your highlighted selection moves one word at a time in that direction.

Which formatting tool is used to highlight the text?

(The Highlight tool is available on the Formatting toolbar. It is analogous to a highlighter you use to mark text on a printed page.) In short, you first select text, and then you highlight the selected text by using the Highlight tool.

Here’s another example of a seemingly simple Office feature that has hidden depths – Highlighting.

For a long time, there’s been a highlight option in Office:  Word, Excel, Outlook and even PowerPoint (albeit in a different form).  They vary a little in each program so this article will go through them all, mentioning alternatives and workarounds too.

Word

Highlighting is there on the Home Tab.  The usual Yellow color but also other colors.

Some of the darker colors have limited usefulness because they are almost unreadable with black text.

Highlighting can be done in two ways:

• Select first. The usual way to format text; select the text then click on the highlight button to apply.
• Select second. Click on the Highlight button then select the text to highlight.  This emulates the way a physical highlight pen would work.
  

The mouse cursor changes to indicate you’re in highlight mode.  Press Escape to stop highlighting.  Or return to the Highlight menu and choose ‘Stop Highlighting’.

‘No Color’ can be used to reverse previous highlighting.

Why use highlighting?

Highlighting can be used two different ways in a document, worksheet or email.

As decoration

Obviously, to draw attention to some important text:

As a reminder to you.

Perhaps less obvious is a reminder to you, the author, of something you need to change or review.

Use highlight in longer or complex documents as a quick marker of places that you need to return to.

It’s easy to see highlights as you’re scanning the document later.

Highlighting is the quick alternative to adding Comments to a document.  In many cases you don’t need to write a full comment, the highlight is enough to remind you.  Of course, you could combine both highlights and comments but that’s usually not necessary.

Searching for Highlighted text

While highlighted text is often used to mark parts of a draft that need more work.   There’s always the risk that the final document will go out with highlighted, unfinished, text still in place!

Prevent that by searching your document for Highlighting.  This is one of the useful, but hidden, advantages of Highlighting – it’s searchable.

Use the Advanced Find dialog to do this:

This example will find all highlighted parts of the document (an empty ‘Find What’).  Use Format | Highlight to find highlights (any color).

Click on Find Next to jump between highlighted passages.  You can leave the Advanced Find dialog open while you change the highlighted text then click Find Next to move along to the next one.

Find – Reading Highlight

The Find feature also has highlighting.  Any search results are highlighted with Yellow.

While it looks the same as the formatting option, it’s only temporary while the search is active.

You can get the same effect with Advanced Find from the Reading Highlight option:

Outlook

Outlook uses Word to run the email editor so many Word features are available when you’re writing emails.

That includes Finding highlighted text and the Find Reading Highlight of results.

PowerPoint

PowerPoint has Highlight for text these days … it didn’t for a long time (too long).

For older PowerPoint releases there is a workaround for Highlight formatting even though you can’t apply it directly.  Make the text with highlights in Word and copy it.  Paste the text into a PowerPoint slide using ‘Keep Source Formatting’, which retains the formatting:

Microsoft’s recommended alternative to Highlighting in PowerPoint is the Glow option in Format Text | Text Effects:

The results differ depending on the size of the text.  ‘Glow’ surrounds the text lines so it extends ‘up’ for capitals, ‘down’ for dropped letters like ‘g’ and gaps in the middle of letters in larger sizes.

Glow is a similar effect to Highlighting but not the same.  It’s a mystery why Microsoft hasn’t added Highlighting (with the associated Find features) to PowerPoint, if only for consistency with Word.

But there are highlight alternatives in PowerPoint.

The Ink Tools include a Highlighter drawing tool that lets you draw in highlights of various widths and colors.

Presenter View does have highlighting among the various drawing and ‘laser pointer’ tools.  Right-click on the presentation.

or choose the drawing button in Presenter View.

Excel

Excel has the same Highlight ribbon button as Word but, alas, not the Find features that accompany it.

Another Office inconsistency.  You’d expect copying trick for PowerPoint (see above) to also work in Excel, After all, Excel directly supports Highlighting.  But not Excel which has always had curious behaviors when pasting in text.  Pasting text with highlights into Excel removes the highlights, even when ‘Keep Source Formatting’ is used.

Excel tricks to highlight selected row, column, heading and more
Highlight or Delete by drawing
Text Highlighting comes to PowerPoint for Windows
Drawing in all sorts of places Microsoft Office apps

Learn how to highlight rows in Excel with Conditional Formatting in this tutorial. We have detailed methods on highlighting rows according to text or numbers, multiple conditions, and blank cells all using Conditional Formatting. Also learn a really cool trick to highlight rows based on the value entered in a separate cell.

Conditional Formatting is an Excel feature that applies specified formatting to cells that meet the supplied criteria. Also, Conditional Formatting is dynamic; it adapts to added, deleted, and edited data. So everything you learn below will be applied to your data dynamically.

You often need values highlighted in datasets, some as a red flag and some as a green flag because they satisfy certain criteria. Since these values are the particulars of a product or person, it would help to have the full row highlighted so you don’t have to eye the highlighted cell first and then see what product or person it is about. A little explanation on how this works before we get down to the methods.

Let’s get highlighting!

Highlighting Entire Row Vs Highlighting a Cell

If you were to directly head to Highlight Cell Rules in Conditional Formatting, you would be highlighting individual cells. Let’s show you an example and explain how highlighting the row instead of just the cell works. Take this dataset as an example:

We have a list of granola bars and want to search for bars that contain eggs as an allergen. Instead of just highlighting the allergen in column C, we want the whole product highlighted which means we want to highlight the full row. Using Conditional Formatting, the rule we will set will be with this formula:

=$C3="Eggs"

Only the column is locked in reference with a dollar sign, not the row. So the formula goes row by row checking the cells starting from row 3 as mentioned in the formula. While the formula searches row by row, it checks only column C as we have entered column C as an absolute reference. When the formula finds «Eggs» in column C, it highlights the whole row. It also helps to select the entire dataset instead of just the column to have the whole rows highlighted.

Highlight Rows Based on a Text Criterion

Setting a new rule in Excel’s Conditional Formatting feature can help us highlight rows based on a text criterion. You may have a dense dataset of products and you need to find and highlight a product based on its name or some other textual quality. That is all too easy with Conditional Formatting.

Using our example, we want to find the granola bars containing the allergen eggs. We will use Conditional Formatting with a new rule to find the text «Eggs» in column C and highlight the rows. These are the steps to highlight rows based on a text criterion:

• Select the whole dataset, except the headers.

• In the Home tab’s Styles group, select the Conditional Formatting button to open its menu.
• Select New Rule… from the menu to open the New Formatting Rule window.

• Select the last rule type «Use a formula to determine which cells to format«.
• In the field provided for the formula, enter the formula:

=$C3="Eggs"

C3 is the first cell from the column containing the word you are searching for, preceded by a dollar sign $.

«Eggs» is the word you are looking for, enclosed in double-quotes.

Note that the dollar sign is used before column C to lock the search for the word only in column C.

• Click on the Format… button to open the Format Cells window and then go to the Fill tab to select a color for highlighting the rows.

• Click the OK button on both windows to close them. The rows with the word «Eggs» in column C will be highlighted:

Highlight Rows Based on a Number Criterion

Using the same steps and concept as above, we can easily highlight rows based on a number criterion. Pretty much everything is the same as done earlier with a change in the formula and of course, a change in the column.

You could be looking to highlight clothing of a certain size or price, or quantities that need restocking. Extending our case example, we are aiming to highlight granola bars close to their expiry. We will show you the steps for this since formulating around a date is different than doing it for any regular number (we have a small formula example at the end of this section for simple numbers).

Below are the steps for highlighting rows based on a number criterion:

• Select all the cells in the dataset. Leave the headers out.
• Go to the Home tab > Styles group > Conditional Formatting button > New Rules… option. This leads to the New Formatting Rule window.
• In the Select a Rule Type: section, select Use a formula to determine which cells to format.
• In the Format values where this formula is true: field, enter the formula:

=$E3<DATE(2025,7,1)

E3 is the first cell from the column where the date is to be searched, a dollar sign to lock the column.

The date is entered in the format (yyyy,m,d) as required by the DATE function.

*See note below on formulas for other numbers.

• Now set the color fill for highlighting the rows by clicking on the Format…
• This redirects us to the Format Cells window.
• Go to the Fill tab and choose the color for highlighting.
• Click on the OK button on the Format Cells window and then on the New Formatting Rule

The rows with dates before 1-7-2025 in column E will be highlighted in the chosen color:

Note: Our example was based on highlighting rows falling before a certain date. If you are forming a rule based on other numeric figures such as price, quantities, etc., the formula would be quite simple. E.g. for finding granola bar prices above $1.6 in column D, the formula would be:

=$D3>1.6

Highlight Rows in Different Colors Based on Multiple Conditions

With Conditional Formatting, we will show you how to highlight rows in different colors based on multiple conditions by adding 2 rules using the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager. Each rule will have its own color and criterion.

The first criterion we will add is to search column D for values greater than 1.6. The rows containing these values will be highlighted in blue. The second rule is to highlight the rows with values greater than 1.8 in green. Now let’s see the steps for highlighting rows in different colors based on multiple conditions:

• Select the range including the dataset, excluding the headers.
• In the Home tab’s Style group, select Conditional Formatting and then select the Manage Rules… options to access the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager.

• In the Manager, select the New Rule… This will lead to the New Formatting Rule window.

• These are the 3 things you need to do in the New Formatting Rule window:
• Select the last option in the Select a Rule Type. Enter your formula in the provided field. Here’s the one we entered:

=$D3>1.6

• We are using this formula to find the values greater than 1.6 in column D, starting from the first row in the dataset which is row 3.
• Set the color for highlighting the rows that this formula applies to by clicking on the Format button then selecting the color in the Fill

• Click on the OK command button when done. You will be redirected back to the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager.
• Select the New Rule… button again to add the second rule.

• Follow the same three steps as with the first rule. Choose the last option from Select a Rule Type.
• Add your second formula. This is what we added:

=$D3>1.3

• Now we want to highlight the rows with values greater than 1.3 in column D. The first point of search is cell D3.
• Select the Format button and then the Fill tab to pick the color for highlighting the rows for the second rule.

• Click on OK. Now you will be back to the Rules Manager with both the rules added.

• Use the arrow buttons to rearrange the order of the rules. Explanation below*

• Select the OK command button.

The rows relevant to the two rules will be highlighted in the respective colors:

Note: The rule at the top gets priority and is applied before the second rule. For our case, we needed to have the first rule at the top. Had we left =$D3>1.3 at the top, all the values fulfilling the other rule =$D3>1.6 would also be greater than 1.3. That way, no row would be highlighted in blue since they have already fulfilled the criteria for the first rule.

Therefore, the rule at the top needs to be =$D3>1.6 so that the values greater than 1.6 are highlighted first and then the rest are left to be highlighted if they are greater than 1.3.

Highlight Rows Where any Cell is Blank

You may have heard of highlighting blank cells with Conditional Formatting but now we’ll show you how to highlight the whole row if any one cell in that row is blank, from any column. Not different from what we’ve seen in the methods above; we create a new rule and use a formula and color for highlighting the rows with blank cells. These are the steps to do this:

• Leaving out the headers, select the dataset.
• Go to the Home tab > Styles group > Conditional Formatting button > New Rule…

• In the New Formatting Rule window make these changes:
• Select Use a formula to determine which cells to format from the Select a Rule Type:
• Add the formula:

=COUNTBLANK($B3:$E3)>0

The COUNTBLANK function counts the number of empty cells in the range. The range included is all the columns of the dataset with the first row of the dataset. The COUNTBLANK function will count the number of blank cells in a row. If the result is greater than zero, that row will be highlighted.

• Select the color for highlighting the rows with blank cells using the Format

• Then click on OK.

The row containing a blank cell in any column will be highlighted:

Highlight Rows Based on the Value Entered in a Separate Cell

Jumping back to our first method, where we wanted to highlight the granola bars containing eggs, these were the results:

Now if you wanted to wipe out these results and highlight the rows with a dairy allergen, you would edit the formula and swap «Eggs» for «Dairy», right? How about you enter whichever allergen you want in a separate cell and it magically highlights the relevant rows?

The quick cap on that is to highlight a separate cell in the color being used for highlighting, yellow in our case. Label it for ease. Then edit the Conditional Formatting Rule from the Manager and include the separate cell in the formula instead of the value «Eggs». Then enter any allergen from column C and the rows containing the allergen will be highlighted!

Now here are the detailed steps to highlight rows based on the value entered in a separate cell:

• Use the Fill Color button to highlight a separate cell in the same color being used in the dataset.
• Also label the separate cell as we have labeled it as Allergen below:

• To open the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager, go to the Home tab > Styles group > Conditional Formatting menu > Manage Rules…

• Select the rule and click on the Edit Rule…

You will see an Edit Formatting Rule window with the current formula.

• Edit the formula: remove the value «Eggs» and replace it with the cell reference of the separate cell by clicking on it.
• The marching-ants line will appear when you click on the cell.

• Click on the OK button on both windows. Now enter a different allergen in the cell H2 and find its row highlighted:

The color fill of the separated cell doesn’t have an impact on the highlighting in the dataset but it’s used more like a key code to show what the rows with the supplied value will be highlighted in.

And that’s how we use Conditional Formatting to highlight not just cells but entire rows in Excel based on different conditions. You just need to know the formula you are working with and you’ll be good. See you with more formulas and methods that you can work well with!

In this article, we will learn about how to Highlight cells that contain specific text using Conditional formatting option in Excel.
Conditional Formatting is used to highlight the data on the basis of some criteria. It would be difficult to see various trends just for examining your Excel worksheet. Conditional Formatting provides a way to visualize data and make worksheets easier to understand.

It allows you to apply formatting basis on the cell values such as colours, icons and data bars. For this, we will create a rule in Conditional Formatting.

Let’s use a function in Conditional Formatting

Select the cells where you wish to apply conditional formatting.

Here we have some of the shade colours of Blue, Purple & red.
We need to highlight all the cells which contains text red in the cell.
Go to Home > Conditional formatting > Highlight Cells Rules > Text that contains

Dialog box appears where we can add text rules.

As you can see from the above snapshot that only the cells which have text red in cells get highlighted.

Select the type of formatting using Custom Format… option.

Select the colour format in the Format cells dialog box.

Sample box shows the type formatting selected.
Select Ok after confirming cell format

As you can see all the cells having text red are highlighted with Green Colour.

Hope you understood how to highlight cells that contain specific text with formulas in 2016. Explore more articles on Conditional formatting here. Please feel free to state your query or feedback in the comment box below. We will assist you.

Related Articles:

Conditional formatting based on another cell value in Excel

IF function and Conditional formatting in Excel

Perform Conditional Formatting with formula 2016

Conditional Formatting using VBA in Microsoft Excel

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