What are conditional formats in excel

Conditional Formatting is one of the most simple yet powerful features in Excel Spreadsheets.

As the name suggests, you can use conditional formatting in Excel when you want to highlight cells that meet a specified condition.

It gives you the ability to quickly add a visual analysis layer over your data set. You can create heat maps, show increasing/decreasing icons, Harvey bubbles, and a lot more using conditional formatting in Excel.

Using Conditional Formatting in Excel (Examples)

In this tutorial, I’ll show you seven amazing examples of using conditional formatting in Excel:

• Quickly Identify Duplicates using Conditional Formatting in Excel.
• Highlight Cells with Value Greater/Less than a Number in a Dataset.
• Highlighting Top/Bottom 10 (or 10%) values in a Dataset.
• Highlighting Errors/Blanks using Conditional Formatting in Excel.
• Creating Heat Maps using Conditional Formatting in Excel.
• Highlight Every Nth Row/Column using Conditional Formatting.
• Search and Highlight using Conditional Formatting in Excel.

1. Quickly Identify Duplicates

Conditional formatting in Excel can be used to identify duplicates in a dataset.

Here is how you can do this:

This would instantly highlight all the cells that have a duplicate in the selected data set. Your dataset can be in a single column, multiple columns, or in a non-contiguous range of cells.

See Also: The Ultimate Guide to Find and Remove Duplicates in Excel.

2. Highlight Cells with Value Greater/Less than a Number

You can use conditional formatting in Excel to quickly highlight cells that contain values greater/less than a specified value. For example, highlighting all cells with sales value less than 100 million, or highlighting cells with marks less than the passing threshold.

Here are the steps to do this:

This would instantly highlight all the cells with values greater than 5 in a dataset.Note: If you wish to highlight values greater than equal to 5, you should apply conditional formatting again with the criteria “Equal To”.

The same process can be followed to highlight cells with a value less than a specified values.

3. Highlighting Top/Bottom 10 (or 10%)

Conditional formatting in Excel can quickly identify top 10 items or top 10% from a data set. This could be helpful in situations where you want to quickly see the top candidates by scores or top deal values in the sales data.

Similarly, you can also quickly identify the bottom 10 items or bottom 10% in a dataset.

Here are the steps to do this:

This would instantly highlight the top 10 items in the selected dataset. Note that this works only for cells that have a numeric value in it.

Also, if you have less than 10 cells in the dataset, and you select the options to highlight Top 10 items/Bottom 10 Items, then all the cells would get highlighted.

Here are some examples of how the conditional formatting would work:

4. Highlighting Errors/Blanks

If you work with a lot of numerical data and calculations in Excel, you’d know the importance of identifying and treating cells that have errors or are blank. If these cells are used in further calculations, it could lead to erroneous results.

Conditional Formatting in Excel can help you quickly identify and highlight cells that have errors or are blank.

Suppose we have a dataset as shown below:

This data set has a blank cell (A4) and errors (A5 and A6).

Here are steps to highlight the cells that are empty or have errors in it:

This would instantly highlight all the cells that are either blank or have errors in it.

Note: You don’t need to use the entire range A1:A7 in the formula in conditional formatting. The above-mentioned formula only uses A1. When you apply this formula to the entire range, excel checks one cell at a time and adjusts the reference. For example, when it checks A1, it uses the formula =OR(ISBLANK(A1),ISERROR(A1)). When it checks cell A2, it then uses the formula =OR(ISBLANK(A2),ISERROR(A2)). It automatically adjusts the reference (as these are relative references) depending on which cell is being analyzed. So you need not write a separate formula for each cell. Excel is smart enough to change the cell reference all by itself 🙂

See Also: Using IFERROR and ISERROR to handle errors in excel.

5. Creating Heat Maps

A heat map is a visual representation of data where the color represents the value in a cell. For example, you can create a heat map where a cell with the highest value is colored green and there is a shift towards red color as the value decreases. 

Something as shown below:

The above data set has values between 1 and 100. Cells are highlighted based on the value in it. 100 gets the green color, 1 gets the red color.

Here are the steps to create heat maps using conditional formatting in Excel.

• Select the data set.
• Go to Home –> Conditional Formatting –> Color Scales, and choose one of the color schemes.

As soon as you click on the heatmap icon, it would apply the formatting to the dataset. There are multiple color gradients that you can choose from. If you are not satisfied with the existing color options, you can select more rules and specify the color that you want.

Note: In a similar way, you can also apply Data Bard and Icon sets.

6. Highlight Every Other Row/Column

You may want to highlight alternate rows to increase the readability of the data.

These are called the zebra lines and could be especially helpful if you are printing the data.

Now there are two ways to create these zebra lines. The fastest way is to convert your tabular data into an Excel Table. It automatically applied a color to alternate rows. You can read more about it here.

Another way is using conditional formatting.

Suppose you have a dataset as shown below:

Here are the steps to highlight alternate rows using conditional formatting in Excel.

That’s it! The alternate rows in the data set will get highlighted.

You can use the same technique in many cases. All you need to do is use the relevant formula in the conditional formatting. Here are some examples:

• Highlight alternate even rows: =ISEVEN(ROW())
• Highlight alternate add rows: =ISODD(ROW())
• Highlight every 3rd row: =MOD(ROW(),3)=0

7. Search and Highlight Data using Conditional Formatting

This one is a bit advanced use of conditional formatting. It would make you look like an Excel rockstar.

Suppose you have a dataset as shown below, with Products Name, Sales Rep, and Geography. The idea is to type a string in cell C2, and if it matches with the data in any cell(s), then that should get highlighted. Something as shown below:

Here are the steps to create this Search and Highlight functionality:

That’s it! Now when you enter anything in cell C2 and hit enter, it will highlight all the matching cells.

How does this work?

The formula used in conditional formatting evaluates all the cells in the dataset. Let’s say you enter Japan in cell C2. Now Excel would evaluate the formula for each cell.

The formula would return TRUE for a cell when two conditions are met:

• Cell C2 is not empty.
• The content of cell C2 exactly matches the content of the cell in the dataset.

Hence, all the cells that contain the text Japan get highlighted.

Download the Example File

You can use the same logic, to create variations such as:

• Highlight the entire row instead of a cell.
• Highlight even when there is a partial match.
• Highlight the cells/rows as you type (dynamic) [You are going to love this trick :)].

How to Remove Conditional Formatting in Excel

Once applied, conditional formatting remains in place unless you remove it manually. As a best practice, keep the conditional formatting applied only to those cells where you need it.

Since it’s volatile, it may lead to a slow Excel workbook.

To remove conditional formatting:

• Select the cells from which you want to remove conditional formatting.
• Go to Home –> Conditional Formatting –> Clear Rules –> Clear Rules from Selected Cells.
  • If you want to remove conditional formatting from the entire worksheet, select Clear Rules from Entire Sheet.

Important things to know about Conditional Formatting in Excel

• Conditional formatting in volatile. It can lead to a slow workbook. Use it only when needed.
• When you copy paste cells that contain conditional formatting, conditional formatting also gets copied.
• If you apply multiple rules on the same set of cells, all rules remain active. In the case of any overlap, the rule applied last is given preference. You can, however, change the order by changing the order from the Manage Rules dialogue box.

You May Also Like the Following Excel Tutorials:

• The Right Way to Apply Conditional Formatting in Pivot Table
• Find and Remove Duplicates in Excel
• The Ultimate Guide to Using Conditional Formatting in Google Sheets
• How to Highlight Weekend Dates in Excel?

How to Use Conditional Formatting to Highlight Text in Excel

How to Use Conditional Formatting to Highlight Text in Excel

Conditional formatting in Excel is formatting that changes with the cell content.

That means you don’t have to change it when the cell content changes.

You use conditional formatting to make it easier for the user to identify key points of interest.

That could be:

• All cells that contain the name of a certain employee
• All rows regarding a certain order number

Or a lot of other things.

Follow this step-by-step guide and learn to highlight text with conditional formatting in Excel.

And a bit more😉

Download the workbook I use in this guide if you want to tag along.

Highlight text with conditional formatting

The reason for highlighting text with conditional formatting is to draw the user’s attention to those cells – so they find relevant information faster🏃

You apply conditional formatting with what is called conditional formatting rules.

It’s really easy to insert one of those.

1. Select all the cells where the text you want to highlight can be.

In the sample data, I want to identify all L compatible adapters. So, I select all cells in column B (from cell B2 and down).

2. In the middle of the Home tab, click ‘Conditional Formatting’.

3. Hover your cursor over ‘Highlight Cells Rules’ and select ‘Text that Contains’.

4. In the dialog box that appears, write the text you want to highlight, in the left field.

As you type it, you can see the conditional formatting applied instantly.

The formatting being applied is the standard conditional formatting format.

5. To change the format, click the drop-down arrow in the right field and select another of the formatting presets.

6. Or you can create your own format by clicking ‘Custom format’.

7. After clicking ‘Custom Format’ the ‘Format Cells’ dialog box appears.

This is the same as the normal ‘Format Cells’ dialog box you’re using when you apply normal formatting in a spreadsheet.

Use whatever formatting style you want for your conditional formatting rule.

And that’s it!

Now, all cells containing the text “L compatible” are highlighted with the chosen formatting.

Because conditional formatting is dynamic, it changes when the data changes. So if the content of a cell changes from whatever to “L compatible” that cell gets highlighted too.

Kasper Langmann, Microsoft Office Specialist

Highlight numbers with conditional formatting

Sometimes you’re not reading all your data in your sheets, you’re just looking for specific numbers.

That can be a tedious process, especially if you have a large data set.

Let’s dive into our inventory list again🤿

If the quantity in stock of an item reaches below 100 it’s critical that you find out, so you can buy more units of that particular item.

Let’s make a simple conditional formatting rule to highlight cells.

1. Select the cells in the quantity column (cells C2 and down).

With those selected cells, we need to apply a ‘Highlight Cells’ conditional formatting rule.

2. In the Home tab of the ribbon, click ‘Conditional Formatting’.

3. Hold your cursor over ‘Highlight Cells Rules’ and click ‘Less than’.

This conditional formatting rule allows you to apply conditional formatting if the value of a cell is less than what you’re defining in a few seconds.

4. In the left field, write the number the cell value should be less than to apply conditional formatting.

As you type, you can see the format of this conditional formatting rule being applied to the selected cells.

Right now, it’s just the standard format: Light Red Fill with Dark Red Text.

Classic👍

5. In the right field, click the drop-down button if you want to change to another formatting preset.

6. Or you can click ‘Custom Format’ to control the formatting style 100%.

And that’s it.

Watch all the values below 100 being highlighted automatically. Beautiful, isn’t it?💕

This conditional formatting rule can be modified to other situations if you take a step back.

For instance, you can turn it upside down and highlight cells that are above 100.

Or cells with values between 50 and 150.

The possibilities are almost endless.

Highlighting entire rows based on a formula

Entire rows look nice when they are formatted in a certain way. Instead of random colored cells everywhere.

So, let me show you how to color an entire row with a conditional formatting rule if the value in column C is less than 100👀

1. Select the entire data set. The selected cells indicate how much of each row is highlighted by the conditional formatting rule.

2. Click ‘Conditional Formatting’ on the Home tab and click ‘New Rule.’

3. In the dialog box that appears, select ‘Use a formula to determine which cells to format’ from the ‘Rule Type’ menu.

4. Right below, enter this formula:

=$C1<100

So, if the value in column C drops below 100, the conditional formatting rule triggers.

You can’t refer to entire columns, so you need to refer to C1. NOT C2, although it seems more logical⚙️

If your data starts in row 3, 5, 10, or whatever other row, the reference still goes to C1 (or whatever column you’re using).

5. Now chose your formatting style from the ‘Custom Format’ button.

Or settle for the standard preset.

And behold!

All the cells in your data rows are now formatted, and not just in 1 column like they typically are with conditional formatting.

Editing and removing conditional formatting rules

The layout and use of a workbook are rarely static, so the conditional formatting that you apply to your sheet may have to be edited at some point.

For instance, the previous highlight cells rules we set… Maybe it’s time to change them.

Luckily that’s fairly easy.

You can edit any conditional formatting rule from the conditional formatting rules manager.

Edit the conditional formatting rule and formatting style

1. Click ‘Conditional Formatting’ from the Home tab and select ‘Manage Rules’.

After you click ‘Manage Rules…’ you’ll see a ‘Conditional Formatting Rules Manager’ dialog box.

Change the following 3 points as you see them on in the manager.

2. Set ‘Show formatting rules for:’ to ‘This Worksheet’ to show all conditional formatting rules for the entire sheet.

3. Find the rule you want to edit (there might be several on the list).

4. Click the ‘Edit Rule’ button.

Another dialog box appears. From here you can change anything about the rule.

Below we’ll go through the different options shown in the screenshot above.

Circle 1) Here you can change the ‘Rule Type’. If you don’t want to apply conditional formatting when “something” happens in a cell, you can change it to apply on all cells and fill them with color based on their value compared to the average of the data.

Circle 2) If you keep the ‘Rule Type’ you can change the “trigger” of the formatting. The trigger depends entirely on which type of conditional formatting rule you choose in circle 1. In this case, you can change the custom formula.

Circle 3) From this little (familiar) box you can change the formatting that you applied in the first place. If you don’t want your cells to turn yellow when it drops below cell value: 100, you can have them turn purple instead.

As you see there are more than enough options.

But wait – there’s more!

Edit the conditional formatting rules range

All of the above is very nice, but if you accidentally selected the wrong area when you made the conditional formatting rule – then it doesn’t help to change the ‘Rule Type’ or whether the cells should be red or blue.

And if you spent 5 minutes entering a unique formula to “trigger” the formatting, then it sucks to delete it and do it all over.

To change the range of cells that the conditional formatting applies to, you don’t need to go to the ‘Edit Rule’ box above.

You just need to click in the ‘Applies to’ column at the rule you want to change in the ‘Conditional Formatting Rules Manager’ box.

If you can’t remember the range that the rule should apply to, click the tiny red arrow to select the range manually.

That’s how you edit a conditional formatting rule✏️

So if you screw one up?

You don’t have to delete it – simply just edit it.

Delete a conditional formatting rule

Sometimes you see a workbook with too many conditional formatting rules.

This can create immense confusion and on top of that, it can make your workbook slow.

In this case, you need to remove conditional formatting from the spreadsheet. Maybe even all of it!

Click the ‘Conditional Formatting’ button on the ‘Home’ tab and hover your mouse over ‘Clear Rules’.

Then click ‘Clear Rules from Entire Sheet’.

That was pretty easy. But it’s not always clever to clear all conditional formatting rules from a sheet!

Sometimes some rules should still apply.

To select specifically which conditional formatting rules are to be removed, click ‘Manage Rules…’ instead.

Here you’ll find the conditional formatting rules manager dialog box that you can use to clear rules, in addition to editing rules.

To delete specific conditional formatting rules:

1. Click the drop-down arrow that initially says “Current Selection”. Change it to “This Worksheet”.
2. Select the conditional formatting rule you don’t want anymore.
3. Press ‘Delete Rule’ to actually clear rules.

Remember to click OK when you’re done.

And that’s how you actually clear rules✏️

That’s it – Now what?

That’s how to highlight cells with conditional formatting.

Like all the cells that contain a specific word or a number.

Heck, you even learned how to remove conditional formatting, create a new rule from a formula, and much more.

Well done💪

Conditional formatting is a part of Excel that can think for itself. Meaning it makes its own decisions. It “reads” the cell and reacts on the content.

There are several other parts of Excel that react to the content of cells – just like conditional formatting does.

And you most definitely want to learn those parts.

So, I’ve made a free course teaching you 2 of the best conditional functions Excel has to offer: IF and SUMIF.

Also, you learn VLOOKUP and pivot tables.

Click here to enroll in my free 30-minute course and I’ll send it to your inbox right away.

Frequently Asked Questions

If you’re looking for a specific answer to a specific question, please see the FAQ section below. Maybe you’ll find what you need😊

Conditional Formatting is formatting that changes when the cell that it’s based on changes.

This is very different from normal formatting which is static and does not change unless you make the change yourself.

For example, you can make a cell change color when its content drops below 100.

Conditional formatting is located on the Home tab on the Ribbon in Excel. The Ribbon is the main menu, on the top of your screen, where most Excel features are accessible from buttons.

Select your data and click the conditional formatting button to use any of the conditional formatting rules.

Yes, you can use the format painter to copy and paste conditional formatting quite easily.

Select the cells with conditional formatting and from the Home tab, click the ‘Format painter‘ button.

Then select the cells where you want to paste conditional formatting.

Kasper Langmann2023-02-23T11:25:29+00:00

Spreadsheets are the go-to information hub for individuals, teams, and organizations of all sizes to store data. However, large data sets can make it difficult to identify trends, pick out key pieces of information, and track deadlines. Luckily, Microsoft Excel has a feature called conditional formatting that alleviates some of these challenges. 

Conditional formatting enables you to apply special formatting to cells in your spreadsheet that meet certain criteria. Excel has a sizable library of preset conditions that you can apply fairly simply, or you can create your own conditional formatting rules using Excel formulas. This guide will provide in-depth step-by-step examples of the most popular conditional formatting functions for basic and advanced users in Excel 2016. Then, we’ll show you how to perform the same functions in another spreadsheet application, Smartsheet.

Looking at a wad of numbers or a litany of texts, you cannot immediately interpret the relation between the values. Lowest prices, highest sales, changing trends, a specific text string, too much information.

Data can be filtered or sorted but how can you sort everything if you want one column showing descending values and the other showing ascending values? Here’s an idea, keep everything where it is and just spotlight the items of interest with some highlighting.

Our quickest understanding of data is very graphic and the best overview will also come through a play of colors and graphics. We’re starting to sound more and more like we’re hinting at Conditional Formatting and yes we are! Don’t know what Conditional Formatting is? Scroll ahead!

What is Conditional Formatting

Conditional Formatting is a feature in Excel that changes the display of cells whose values meet the Conditional Formatting rule’s criterion. Conditional Formatting makes it very easy to make note of important data whether numerical or non-numerical.

This feature uses graphic means such as highlighting, icons, and data bars to visually cast attention on the required group of values. By doing that, Conditional Formatting makes reviewing and visual analysis of data a very quick task without rearranging the data.

How Does Conditional Formatting Work?

Conditional Formatting applies to cells on the worksheet. At its very basic, you need to select the cells and then apply one of the Conditional Formatting rules. You can choose from the preset options or create your own rule (we will tell you how to do both).

The basic concept is that if a cell meets the Conditional Formatting condition, it results in TRUE and will be reformatted. If it results in FALSE, it won’t be reformatted.

The ease of Conditional Formatting is not only due to the visual impact, but also the automatic selection of the target data. Let’s say e.g., you want the sales figures over $1,000 highlighted below:

If this was a manual task, you would select the cells and then use Fill Color to flag the cells. With Conditional Formatting, you do not have to worry about selecting the right cells.

If you select all the data cells from column C, Conditional Formatting will do the job of flagging the right cells according to the set rule. Therefore, select all the cells with the sales figures:

Now where is this Conditional Formatting feature we’ve been talking about? In the Home tab, you will find the Conditional Formatting icon in the Styles group.

Conditional Formatting has highlighted the cells from the dataset that had sales of over $1,000:

Want to see how that’s done? Highlighting is not the only thing this feature does so you won’t get this formatting by just a click on the icon. Conditional Formatting has a bunch of options in its menu:

We’ll talk about creating different types of rules to conditionally format cells ahead in this tutorial.

Notes:

Conditional Formatting deals with numbers, dates, time, and text strings and while some rules won’t work for text, they all work for numbers, dates, and time (excluding the Text that Contains rule).

Conditional Formatting is dynamic. This means that it will adjust its result according to changes within the data. E.g. if a value that was previously not highlighted with Conditional Formatting is changed and meets the criterion of the applied rule, it will then be highlighted.

If you intend to make additional entries to the data and want Conditional Formatting to accommodate them, you can try leaving the references in the formula free if it doesn’t hinder the results of the Conditional Formatting rule(s).

E.g. enter B3 instead of $B$3. Another option is to force Conditional Formatting to include more rows/columns by using the Format Painter parallelly to the new row/column and then adding the data. Otherwise, you can simply extend the range in the Rules Manager.

Any Conditional Formatting action can be undone with Undo or Ctrl + Z including adding a new rule, deleting a rule, applying a rule, and editing a rule.

Cell Formatting You Can/Cannot Change

The format of a cell comprises several elements e.g., font size, font color, color fill, border, row height, etc. and there is only so much that Conditional Formatting can do. Some elements of the cell format can be changed by Conditional Formatting while others can’t. To keep your expectations real, let’s classify the elements of cell formats into what Conditional Formatting can and cannot change.

The Format Cells dialog box is what you will get when you click on the (Custom) Format button while dealing with a formatting rule. We can open Format Cells through Conditional Formatting and see what the feature will allow. Good idea. Let’s go through the Format Cells dialog box tab by tab, beginning with the Number tab:

All Number formats are applicable through Conditional Formatting including Custom Number Format.

The next tab is the Font tab:

In the Font tab, the elements of the font in the cell that we will be able to change with Conditional Formatting are font style (bold, italic, etc.), color, underline, and effects (strikethrough, superscript, etc.).

The rest of the elements that are grayed out are not accessible and cannot be changed using the Conditional Formatting feature. These are font family and size.

Moving on to the Border tab:

Border styles are changeable from the available options. The Border color can also be altered.

If you’re familiar with Borders in Excel, you’ll know that the Border styles in Conditional Formatting are limited. To be more specific, the double border and thicker borders are missing. So, the deduction is that border thickness cannot be changed with Conditional Formatting.

Let’s see what we can do fill-wise in the Fill tab:

All the Fill options can be edited in Conditional Formatting.

All in all, other than some font and border elements, all others can be changed through Conditional Formatting. Comparing this window to the regular Format Cells dialog box, we notice we have a couple of tabs missing; the Alignment and Protection tabs.

Conditional Formatting does not give access to these tabs which implies that the feature cannot change the text alignment or the protection of a cell via the feature.

Note:

Conditional Formatting is only a formatting feature and does not affect the value of a cell.

Conditional Formatting Options

Let’s refer back to the Conditional Formatting menu:

We’re going to tackle each item in this menu so…

Let’s get formatting! Conditionally though…

Highlight Cells Rules

One of the most commonly used features of Conditional Formatting is Highlight Cells. Selected cells will be highlighted according to a chosen cell highlighting rule. There are a few interesting preset rules available in this category e.g., highlighting a particular value, a cell that contains the given text, etc. Let’s go over all the options so you know how to apply them to your Excel work.

Greater Than…

The Greater Than rule highlights numerical values greater than the user-provided value. This option can be used to cast focus on high-performing products, the highest tier in an age group, amounts over a borderline value, etc. If that sounds like what you’re targeting, you can use the steps below to highlight cells with numerical values greater than the supplied value.

As an example, we’re taking some sales data categorized by product and state. For now, we want to find out which product is giving us the highest sales and from which region. Here’s how we do it:

• Select the relevant cells with the numeric values from where you want the highlighted cells.

• Select the Home tab’s Conditional Formatting icon in the Styles Point to Highlight Cells Rules and select the Greater Than rule.

• This rule will lead to a dialog box where you can set the numerical value and format intended for the highlighted cell. Gauging the selected cells, Excel will already provide you with an example value in the dialog box.
• In the Greater Than dialog box, adjust the numerical value in the text box. *(Read note below). The numbers that are greater than this number will be highlighted in the dataset. E.g. in our case, we want sales greater than $600 to be highlighted.
• You can also choose another format for the highlighted cells from the drop-down list in the dialog box.

• When done setting the number and format, click on the OK button of the dialog box.

The dialog box will close and the cells with sales greater than $600 will be highlighted in the chosen format:

Notes:

* The number $600 can also be added as a cell reference by clicking on the applicable cell with the blinking cursor in the text box of the dialog box. This would be the easier way if the value you want to set is a decimal.

By default, the highlight format for the cells will be light red fill with dark red text. This can quickly be changed to another ready format from the drop-down menu in the dialog box which also carries an option of a custom format. You’ll see how to set a custom highlight format in a while.

Less Than…

Let’s squeeze in the opposite of what we did just now in the same example. With the same concept, Conditional Formatting also gives the option of highlighting cells with values less than a provided number.

After applying this formatting rule in our case example, we’ll be able to see the top and flop products together on the same sheet, distinguished by a different format. See the steps and find out what that would look like:

• Select the data cells and go to the Conditional Formatting icon in the Home From the menu, head to Highlight Cells Rules and now select the Less Than option.

• Now you will have a Less Than dialog box, much like the one we saw earlier.
• Enter the number in the text field. Conditional Formatting will use this number to determine which cells should be highlighted. For our case, we are going with $150 so that values under 150 will be flagged.
• Change the format if you wish. We are aiming to highlight the bottom values so the default red format is good with us.

• Then hit the OK

From the selected cells, the products with sales lower than $150 are highlighted in the default red format:

Since we’ve used the Less Than rule with the Greater Than rule, we get a quick view of the hot and not products. Notice how we’re halfway to making a heat map?

Now that we mention it, Conditional Formatting is already ahead of us and allows us to create heat maps in Excel. How? You’ll see later. Hint: Color Scales.

Between…

The Between option highlights numerical values between 2 given numbers. This can be particularly helpful e.g., color coding an age group of interest. We’ll take a simple example and show you how it works.

In our simple example case, 10 people take part in a 5-question quiz to win a prize. A point is awarded for each question so we’d like to see how many participants scored averagely, say between 2 and 4. This is how to use Conditional Formatting to highlight values between 2 numbers inclusive:

• Select the number cells and open the Conditional Formatting menu from the Home Select Highlight Cells Rules > Between.

• A dialog box will appear for you to set the range of values and the highlighting format.
• Enter the numbers between which you want values highlighted in the dataset.
• This range works inclusively and the top and bottom values will also be highlighted.
• Choose a format for the highlighted cells and then click on the OK

We have set the values between 2 and 4 to be highlighted with a yellow fill:

Equal To…

But more importantly, wouldn’t you want to find out the winners? Of course you would. That would require highlighting the cells with a score of 5. Conditional Formatting makes highlighting cells carrying a specific value a task done in seconds.

Using the Equal To option in Highlight Cells Rules, we have mentioned the steps to highlight cells of a single value:

• Select the cells with the numbers.
• Go to Home tab > Conditional Formatting icon > Highlight Cells Rules > Equal To.

• In the text box in the Equal To dialog box, enter the number you want highlighted in the dataset and select the format for those highlighted cells.

• When you press the OK button, the entered number will be highlighted in the set format:

Text that Contains…

By now it looks like Highlight Cells Rules only likes working with numbers but that’s not the case. Have you ever had difficulty finding a part of text from a text string because it was not categorized appropriately?

We’ve been there too. If the target is to locate those cells or split the text, you can use Ctrl + F and other options to divide the text but if you want the text string found and the cell containing the text highlighted, nothing does it better than Conditional Formatting.

Follow the steps relating to the example ahead to find and highlight cells that contain the provided text with Conditional Formatting:

In this example, we have a list of fragrances with their brand names both mentioned together in column B. If we want to see which perfumes are made by a particular brand, taking e.g. Chanel, we will start by:

• Select the cells containing the data that you want to check.
• In the Conditional Formatting menu (Home tab > Style group), select Highlight Cells Rules and then the Text that Contains

• In the text field add the string of text you want to find in the data cells.
• To choose your format for the highlights, click on Custom Format from the drop-down menu.

• We’ve set a custom format with an orange color fill.

• Click OK on both windows to close them and apply Conditional Formatting to the cells in the custom format.

As per the set format and text value entered in the dialog box, the cells containing that text value will be highlighted:

A Date Occurring…

Another type of number value Conditional Formatting runs with is dates. With the A Date Occurring option, dates that range from the previous month to the next month can be highlighted.

For specific dates, you’ll have to resort to other Conditional Formatting rules since this rule does the job of highlighting dates relative to the current date e.g. dates from last week, yesterday, next month, etc.

Would be easier with an example? We think so too. Our example shows the order dates and scheduled delivery dates of a range of products. Take the current date as 25^th of July. We want to highlight the dates from the list that are scheduled to be delivered the next day i.e. on the 26^th of July.

With the following steps, you can use the A Date Occurring rule to highlight the date cells relative to the date option selected.

• Select the cells with the dates.
• Our target is to highlight the delivery date cells so we’ll select the date cells from column D.

• From the Home tab, select the Conditional Formatting button, Highlight Cells Rules, A Date Occurring.

• In the dialog box, open the first drop-down menu and select the required option.
• In our example, we want the dates for the next day highlighted and hence, we will go with the ‘Tomorrow’ option.

• Use the next drop-down menu to change the highlighted cells format.

The cells with the date 26^th July 2022 in column D will be highlighted according to the selected format:

Note: The plus point of using A Date Occurring instead of forming a rule to highlight the 26^th specifically is that this option will work relatively; with the changing date, the dates for the next day will automatically be highlighted e.g., on the 26^th, 27^th will be highlighted.

Duplicate Values…

When dealing with large data, there is a possibility of doubly-made entries and duplicate values. In most cases, you would want to avoid this and a good place to start would be to highlight them. Let’s see how to highlight repeat values with Conditional Formatting using an example.

In this example, we have used the RANDBETWEEN function to return 10 random numbers from 1 to 20. On its own, RANDBETWEEN doesn’t return unique numbers and there will be duplicates. Let’s check our data for duplicates with Conditional Formatting’s Duplicate Values option.

• Select the range you want to be searched for repetitions.
• From the Styles group in the Home tab, go to the Conditional Formatting’s Highlight Cells Rules menu and select Duplicate Values.

• In the dialog box, the default selection is “Duplicate” *(read note below) so you only need to change the default format if you want to.

• Select the OK command to close the dialog box and apply the Conditional Formatting for duplicate values:

* There is also an option to highlight unique values as shown in the example shot.

Top/Bottom Rules

We can now move on to the second item in the Conditional Formatting menu. The Top/Bottom Rules help the user format the top or bottom number values. In this set of rules, we have options for highlighting the top/bottom items, top/bottom x%, and the above/below average items.

Keep in mind that Top/Bottom Rules do not work on non-number values so text values, you’re out for now.

Also, we have a very interesting finding. The top/bottom percentage rule is a quick way to highlight the required percentile! If you’ve worked with percentiles before, you’ll find this particular feature rather handy.

Let’s start exploring the preset options in the Top/Bottom Rules one by one.

Top 10 Items…

Say you have a long list of expenses (don’t we all) and want to point out the top 10 items in the list that are taking up the most bucks. The top 5 priciest products, the top 15 songs from a database with the most hits; this is what you can use the Top 10 Items option for.

Another instance where you can use the Top 10 Items rule is the example ahead. We have the test marks out of 50 in a class of 10 students. Since our data consists of 10 students, we obviously won’t be searching for the top “10”.

Gladly, we can change this number. Let’s aim to find the top 3 scores on this test with Conditional Formatting’s Top 10 Items rule:

• Select the cells from the data containing the numbers, dates, or time.

• Now open the Conditional Formatting menu and go to Top/Bottom Rules and then Top 10 Items.

• The Top 10 Items dialog box has the number 10 suggested by default.
• Change the number ‘10’ according to your requirement using the spin button or by editing the value in the text box.
• At this point, you can also change the highlight format through the drop-down menu.

• To apply the format, close the dialog box with the OK

The top 3 items in the list are highlighted. In our case example, one of the marks has a repeat value i.e. 39 which is why you see 4 highlighted cells below:

The next rule in line is Top 10 % but we’ll bump up Bottom 10 Items because doesn’t that make a better succession to Top 10 Items?

Bottom 10 Items…

The Bottom 10 Items rule highlights, well yes, the bottom items. It works opposite of the Top 10 Items rule. Why would we want to bring the bottom items to notice? This could be for detecting the lowest performance products, months of lowest sales in a report, lowest scores, etc.

Taking the example from the section above, we will now study the 3 lowest scores. Looking at the range of bottom scores will help us ascertain if it’s just the lowest score that’s pulling the percentile down or if more students have scored similarly.

Let’s go ahead with using Conditional Formatting’s Bottom 10 Items rule to highlight the bottom 3 items in our case example:

• In the dataset, select the range with the numbers.
• From the Top/Bottom Rules in Conditional Formatting, select the Bottom 10 Items

• Change the number in the dialog box in line with the number of bottom items you want highlighted.
• Set the format of choice for the highlighted cells.

• When done, use the OK button to close the dialog box and highlight the relevant cells.

Here you can see that the bottom 3 items are highlighted in the chosen format:

The bottom 3 marks are 31, 33, and 34 showing that the lowest score is not the only reason for the lower percentiles since two other students out of 10 have scored likewise.

Top 10 %…

This is a very interesting rule. The Top 10 % rule works out the percentage from the numbers in the selected cells and highlights the cells with the numbers that fall in the top 10% (percentage can be adjusted).

With Excel putting in so much effort, isn’t life that much easier? Let’s find out if it is so! To highlight the top x% with Conditional Formatting use these steps:

• Begin with selecting the data cells with the numbers.
• Go to Home tab > Styles group > Conditional Formatting button > Top/Bottom Rules > Top 10 %.

• In the text field of the dialog box, you can change the percentage number which by default is set at 10.
• We’ll leave it at 10 since we are also aiming to calculate the top 10%. To calculate e.g. the bottom 25%, change this number to 25 in the dialog box.
• Use the drop-down menu in the dialog box to change the format of cells that are to be highlighted.

• Click on the OK button when done.

The marks falling in the top 10% of the selected cells will be highlighted:

Bottom 10 %…

After the Top 10 % follows the Bottom 10 %. The antithesis of what we just saw earlier, the Bottom 10 % rule takes the numbers in the selected cells to highlight the values that fall in the lower 10% of the numbers.

Carrying forward the previous example, let’s test how this rule works to highlight the bottom 10% with the top 10% already highlighted.

• Select the cells from the dataset and go to the Conditional Formatting options to select the Bottom 10 % rule in the Top/Bottom Rules.

• Set the format for highlighting and the number for the percentage in the Bottom 10% dialog box.

• When the OK command is pressed, the bottom 10% of the values will be highlighted.

Percentage or Percentile?

Let’s analyze what is happening here now that we’ve got the top and bottom 10% highlighted. And for discussion’s sake, we’re only talking about 10% here (though this can be any other percentage). If you think about regular percentage, 10% of 50 marks should be 5 marks so the top 10% (i.e. 90%) should be 45 marks.

In the Top 10 % rule, Conditional Formatting determines the top 10% only from the numbers selected. That means, this rule is unconcerned with the actual percentage because it is taking the lowest and highest values in the selection as 0% and 100%. Does that sound familiar? That is also the concept of percentile.

This finding is in line with percentile computations. If you look at the example shot above, we have calculated the 10th and 90th percentiles as 31.2 and 37.5 with the PERCENTILE.INC function. Compare this to the cells highlighted by Conditional Formatting.

For the top 10%, we have 31 marks highlighted (falls under 31.2 marks) and for the bottom 10%, 48 marks have been highlighted (going over 47.5 marks).

On this deduction, we can conclude that the Top and Bottom 10 % rules work as percentiles and can be a quick visual percentile map! Fascinating!

Above Average…

This section will further confirm the percentile theory. The Above Average rule in the Top/Bottom Rules highlights all the number values in the selection that are above the average of those numbers i.e. above 50% or the median.

Our previous example case has the median calculated using the PERCENTILE.INC function. Therefore, we’ll show you the steps to highlight the cells that are above the average of those numbers using Conditional Formatting’s Above Average rule.

• After selecting the cells with the numbers, click on the Conditional Formatting icon to access the Above Average option from the Top/Bottom Rules.

• You will be led to the Above Average dialog box:
• There is only one setting in this dialog box and i.e. the format of the highlighted cells.
• This rule only focuses on the average or 50% since the percentages can be adjusted in the Top and Bottom 10% rules.

• Hit OK when done and find one half of the values above average highlighted in the set format:

Below Average…

And for the other half of the average, this rule highlights the values from the cell selection that are below the average of those numbers.

Let’s piece this together with the case example from above and highlight the values below the average with Conditional Formatting’s Below Average rule with the steps mentioned ahead:

• Select the data with the numbers from where you want to calculate the average.
• Apply the Below Average rule by selecting Home tab, Conditional Formatting icon, Top/Bottom Rules, Below Average

• Set the preferred format for the highlighted values in the dialog box and click on the OK

The values below average in the selected cells will be highlighted in the set format:

Calculated as per the PERCENTILE.INC function, 50% of these numbers are above 37.5 marks, and 50% fall below. Evaluating the results of the highlights, we can see that Conditional Formatting tallies with the percentile system.

Data Bars

While numbers are crucial for calculations and analysis, the best type of data is one that is easily perceptible with distinguished high and low points. These two Conditional Formatting features (namely Data Bars and Color Scales) fulfill the convenience of giving the data a visual representation.

First comes Data Bars. Data Bars won’t be a very alien concept if you’ve seen bar charts. It’s like a personal bar for each cell.

Data Bars underlays a single bar in the selected cell. For a selected range, a bar will be added to each cell in line with and under the cell’s number value. The value of the cell determines and is directly proportional to the length of its Data Bar; small number – small bar.

In case you would ever want to add Data Bars to your dataset, we suggest these steps using Conditional Formatting in a simple example:

• Select the cells you want to add the Data Bars
• In the Home tab, head to the Styles group to access the Conditional Formatting Hover the cursor on Data Bars to reveal the menu. Choose the Data Bar style from the menu from Gradient Fill or Solid Fill. The color can also be chosen or you can create your own style from More Rules.

The Data Bars will be entered in the chosen style:

If you want to go for customized Data Bars, click on More Rules in the Data Bars menu.

In the Type fields, you have various options to change the type of Data Bar e.g., the one we just showed you was simply according to the numerical value. You can change this to percentile, percentage, etc. instead of numerical value.

These are fairly detailed options including changes for the bar direction (left to right, right to left) and Negative Value and Axis settings for when the data includes negative numbers.

Note: Data Bars and Icon Sets will also not affect the cell value as Conditional Formatting is only a formatting feature.

Color Scales

Remember we spoke of heat maps earlier? Now is a good time to come back to that. Excel can speedily ready a heat map for your dataset with Color Scales in Conditional Formatting. Think of it as color coding for the numbers in your data e.g., on a scale of red to green, the smallest number is red and the largest number is green. If you’re the one who had every color highlighter for studies or work, you’ll love this!

The perk of a Color Scale is that it can tell the position of any number in the range by the shade of the cell’s color. We’ll put Color Scales into action now with a very black and white example of product and state-wise categorized sales data.

• Select the relevant range for adding the Color Scale.

• Select Conditional Formatting from the Ribbon in the Home Hover the mouse pointer on Color Scales to open up some preset options.

Select the favored Color Scale or you can use the More Rules option to form a custom 2 or 3-Color Scale where you can also specify the minimum, mid (if any), and maximum values for the color points.

When the Color Scale is selected, it will be immediately applied to the selected range.

See how that works to give an instantaneous overview of the values? Maybe some of your highlighters have already made their way to the garbage.

Icon Sets

This is another very cool feature called Icon Sets that shows in what range a cell’s value lies according to its icon added by Conditional Formatting. Icon Sets applies a set of icons to the cells in selection. The Icon Sets represent the lowest, highest, and multiple mid (can be excluded) values that are editable.

Let’s apply Icon Sets in an example of quality assurance scores for 10 products. See what to do below to use Icon Sets in Conditional Formatting.

• Select the number cells for applying Icon Sets.
• Go to the Home tab > Conditional Formatting icon and point to the Icon Sets
• If you want to apply Icon Sets with the default settings* click on the relevant Icon Set from the menu. To change the settings according to which the icons will be added, click on the More Rules option in the Icon Sets menu.

• You will see a New Formatting Rule dialog box:

• Now make the changes as per your preference. These are the changes made for our case example:
• Pick the style from the Icon Style drop-down menu.
• Change the Type from Percentage to Number so that the Icons are entered according to the number of the cell, not the percentage of the number against all the selected cells.
• Set the numbers in the Value fields as the range for each icon. E.g. for values 12 and higher, a green check mark will be returned. Values between 8 and 11 will be assigned a yellow exclamation point and for lower numbers, there will be a red cross mark.

• If you want the numbers overwritten, click the Show Icon Only checkbox.
• Click on the OK button after the changes are made.

The Icon Set has been entered with the values in the selected cells in accordance with the changed settings:

* When applied, Icon Sets will enter icons to the selected cells in their default settings. The icons are set at equal percentage intervals e.g., a 3-Icon Set is applied at 33 percent intervals, 4-Icon Set at 25 percent intervals and 5-Icon Set at 20 percent intervals.

Tip: If you want the values and icons in separate columns, paste the values in another column, apply the Icon Set and overwrite the values by tick-marking the Show Icon Only checkbox in the settings.

Change Conditional Formatting Rule

To change a rule in Conditional Formatting, you need access to the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager. The Rule Manager enlists all the Conditional Formatting rules and allows changing, deleting, creating, and stacking rules according to preference of application.

You would want to change a rule in the case that an incorrect rule has been formed or some element of the rule needs editing and the original rule is not required anymore e.g., instead of the top 10 items, we want to highlight the top 3 items and don’t need to keep the top 10 items highlighted.

The original rule will not be overwritten if a new rule is formed.

See how to change a Conditional Formatting Rule using the steps written below:

• Select the range to which the rule applies.
• If you’re unclear about the range, you can select just a single cell or make a rough estimate of the range and the rules applied to the selected cell/range will be shown in the Rules Manager. Otherwise, you can select the entire sheet from the active worksheet or even from the Rules Manager.
• To open the Rules Manager, open the Conditional Formatting options from the Home tab and select Manage Rules.

• The Conditional Formatting Rules Manager lists the created rules for the cells selected on the worksheet. You can change this in the Show formatting rules for drop-down menu at the top in the Rules Manager.

• Select the rule you want to edit and click on the Edit Rule Alternatively, you can double-click a rule to edit it.

• Use the Edit Formatting Rule window to change the rule description and/or rule type.

• When you press the OK command, the edited rule will show in the Rules Manager.

• Press the OK button to apply the edited Conditional Formatting Rule.

As a result of the rule being changed from top 3 to top 2, only the top 2 numbers are highlighted in the example case above.

Delete Conditional Formatting Rule

Conditional Formatting Rules are deleted from the Conditional Formatting Rule Manager.

To completely remove a rule from the worksheet, you will have to delete the rule. It may also be easier to create a new rule instead of editing an old one in which case, you will have to delete the old rule. Deleting a rule is reversible by undoing the action so if you accidentally lose a rule, you can get it back.

Check these steps on how to delete a Conditional Formatting Rule:

• Select a cell in the range of the rule that you want to delete.
• Go to Home tab > Style group > Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules.

• This option opens the Conditional Formatting Rule Manager.
• Click on the rule and hit the Delete Rule

• The rule will be deleted without any confirmation. It’s not really a problem, if you delete the wrong rule, hit the Cancel command. If you’ve already pressed the OK button, you can hit Undo; the rule will be back.
• After deleting the rule, select the OK

The rule will be deleted and the formatting relevant to that rule will be cleared:

Deleting all Rules from Selection

One last thing left in the Conditional Formatting menu. While it’s easy to delete whichever rule from the Rules Manager, it can be tiresome carefully looking at absolutely referred ranges to see which rule applies where especially if you aim to delete the rules only from a specific range without deleting others.

To clear rules from a specific range, select the cells and go to Conditional Formatting icon > Clear Rules > Clear Rules from Selected Cells.

If you want to delete all the rules from the worksheet, you can go for Clear Rules from Entire Sheet instead of deleting the rules one by one from the Rules Manager. The other two options become available if there is an Excel Table or PivotTable present on the worksheet.

New Rule

New rules will not overwrite rules, they will be stacked (newest first unless the order is changed in the Rules Manager if any results are overlapping.

While more favorably you can create a new rule from Conditional Formatting’s New Rule option, a few options are also available in the Quick Analysis tool. The icon appears in the bottom-right corner when you select more than one data cell:

Click on this icon to see the options.

This is the little cousin of Conditional Formatting with 5 rules and an option to clear formatting from the selected area. Conditional Formatting in the Quick Analysis tool will add new rules to the selected range; it won’t overwrite rules.

New Formatting Rule Dialog Box

This dialog box will come into play with 3 actions; creating a new rule, editing a rule, and when you select More Rules in the Conditional Formatting menu. Most of the items in Rule Type are pretty much an extension of the options in the Conditional Formatting menu and some of them you will see in the sections later. Let’s quickly go over the Rule Types and what they contain.

Format all cells based on their values

This rule type has detailed options regarding Color Scales, Data Bars, and Icon Sets.

Format only cells that contain

This one’s intriguing. This rule type has varied options for formatting cells based on a specified value (number and text), date, blanks, no blanks, errors, and error-free cells.

Format only top or bottom ranked values

Here we can select top or bottom items or percentages to format the cells accordingly.

Format only values that are above or below average

This type is for widening the Above and Below Average rule in Conditional Formatting. We can format the cells with the average inclusive or exclusive and can also see some standard deviation options (hello math and stats).

Format only unique or duplicate values

Simply includes duplicate and unique values formatting.

Use a formula to determine which cells to format

If none of the preset rules and rule types suit your Excel action, you can get the needful done by entering a formula here.

Common Use Cases of Conditional Formatting

Now that we’ve covered everything contained in the Conditional Formatting menu, we can move on to scenarios that would commonly use Conditional Formatting. Some have already been discussed above. Let’s see what else Conditional Formatting can do.

Use Conditional Formatting to Highlight Alternate Rows

Highlighting alternate rows is nothing big for Conditional Formatting. And while this can also be done using a preset format in Excel Tables, you might not want to convert your range to a Table.

There are quite a few formulas that can be used with Conditional Formatting to highlight every other row. We’ll go with the one used in our example case below because it’s easy to tweak for your range and requirement. Let’s see the formula and how to apply it using Conditional Formatting to highlight alternate rows:

• On the worksheet, select the range where you want the alternately highlighted rows.
• Click on the Conditional formatting button in the Home tab and choose New Rule.

• There are 3 steps you need to take in the New Formatting Rule dialog box.
• In the Select a Rule Type section, choose Use a formula to determine which cells to format.
• In the given text box, enter this formula to highlight every other row:

=INT(MOD(ROW(),2))

Explanation below*

• Hit the Format button to set the format for the highlighted rows.

• One more step, select the OK
• That’s alternate rows highlighted for you with Conditional Formatting:

• The ROW function will take the number of the row the formula is entered in. Starting from the first row, in our example case, the number will be 3. The MOD function will return the remainder after 3 is divided by the supplied number 2. We are left with the number 1. The INT function is there to round the remainder down to an integer. Left with 1, the formula highlights the first row.

This formula can highlight even rows for you. So you can use this formula instead:

=INT(MOD(ROW()+1,2))

With the added 1, the formula will highlight the rows starting from the second row (the remainder 1 added to the extra 1 in this formula equals 2) in the range:

Use Conditional Formatting to Find & Highlight Blank Cell Rows

There are two aspects to highlighting blank cells in Excel. The first is only highlighting the blank cells. The second is highlighting the entire row or column in the dataset containing the blank cell.

Highlighting blank cells with Conditional Formatting doesn’t require any formula. There’s an in-built setting to highlight blank cells in the New Formatting Rule dialog box.

To enable it, select the area containing the blank cells and go to Conditional Formatting menu > New Rule. In the dialog box, select Format only cells that contain as the rule type and Blanks in the drop-down menu. Set the format.

This setting will highlight blank cells in the selected range. We had selected D6:D15.

To highlight the full row (let’s say from B7 to D7 when D7 is found blank), you’ll have to include a formula in the works so we can control highlighting the full row of the table. Here’s what you need to do to highlight the full row containing the blank cells with Conditional Formatting:

• Select the range in the dataset containing the blank cells. You need to select the area that you would want to be highlighted. In our case, the blank cells are among D6:D15 but we want the full row highlighted so we have to select the B6:D15.
• Create a new rule by selecting New Rule in the Conditional Formatting

• A New Formatting Rule dialog box will open. Make these changes in the dialog box:
• Click on the last option in Select a Rule Type field.
• Set the desired format for highlighting the rows.
• Enter this formula in the text box:

=COUNTBLANK($D6)

The reason we are using the COUNTBLANK function instead of ISBLANK is that our cells appear blank but contain a formula returning an empty text string. These will not be counted as blank by ISBLANK but COUNTBLANK will do the job for us.

Also note that the formula contains $D6 as the reference. This is the trick that highlights the full row in the selection. If the reference was D$6, the full column will be highlighted. For $D$6 as the reference, the mix of the two will be highlighted. Since we only want to highlight the full row of the selection, we’ve kept the row free with $D6.

• Hit the OK button when done.

Conditional Formatting will highlight, from the cell selection, the entire row with the empty cells:

Use Conditional Formatting to Highlight Overdue Dates

If you have a date-wise schedule for tasks and want to view the overdue tasks, Conditional Formatting makes that possible by highlighting the overdue date cells.

This can be done in 3 ways. Using the Less Than Highlighting Rule and entering the date. The dates before the given date will be returned.

But it won’t be possible to use the TODAY function in this method and neither will you be able to highlight the full row. The second method for conditionally formatting overdue dates involves the steps as follows:

• Select the date cells and create a new rule from the Conditional Formatting options from the Ribbon.

• Choose the second rule type in the dialog box.
• Select Cell Value and less than in the first and second fields of the Rule Description.
• Enter the formula mentioned ahead in the text box:

=TODAY()

• Set your preferred format for highlighted overdue dates.

• Press the OK command to create the new rule and highlight the overdue dates in the designated format:

The third way is to use the formula rule to add a complete formula that can be edited to highlight complete rows or columns instead of cells. No different from how we highlighted blank rows in the previous section.

Use Conditional Formatting to Compare Two Columns

When comparing columns for the the same or unique items, Conditional Formatting doesn’t leave much to work on our part as it can highlight duplicates or unique items in two (or more) lists. This will quickly give you an idea of common or even mismatched items especially if you are comparing columns linearly (line by line).

Earlier we showed you how to highlight duplicate numbers in a single column. Now let’s see how Conditional Formatting works to compare words in two columns. We’ll also switch it up to find unique values instead. Follow the steps below to compare two columns by highlighting unique values using Conditional Formatting:

• Select the data from the two columns that you want to compare.
• Select the Conditional Formatting icon > Highlight Cells Rules > Duplicate Values.

• Select Unique from the first drop-down menu in the Duplicate Values dialog box.
• Assign a format for the highlighted cells.

• Next, click on the OK

Return to the worksheet to find the unique values highlighted:

Use Conditional Formatting to Create Search and Format Box

This has to be the best of Excel tricks with Conditional Formatting and we’ve saved it for now! If whatever you enter in a particular cell will be searched on the sheet and highlighted, wouldn’t that be so cool to learn? We’re in the affirmative. There are a couple of ways to do this. One is to directly assign a formula to the data range. The steps to do this are right here:

• Assign a free cell on the worksheet as the search box.
• You can also label it. Highlight it in the same color that the searched and highlighted cells from the data would be. *(refer below)

• Select the range where the search will be targeted.
• For our case, we’ve selected B3 to B12.
• Make a new rule by selecting New Rule in the Conditional Formatting options in the Home
• In the dialog box, select Use a formula to determine which cells to format as the Rule Type.
• In the provided field, enter this formula:

=SEARCH($F$2,B3)

• This formula uses F2 as the search box and the target to be searched has been entered as B3 which will apply to the whole data range in column B. If you want to enter more columns as your search target, you can add the references using the & operator. E.g. if we were to include column C, we would refer B3&C3 or B3:C12 in the formula.

• Hit OK on the dialog box and you’re ready to go!

Now when you return to the worksheet, all your data range will be highlighted. Enter your search item in the search box and see the relevant cell(s) highlighted!

You can also try searching numbers:

The second method is to use a preset rule subject to highlight as per the search in F2. See how to do that with these steps:

• Select the data range for the search.
• Go to Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cells Rules > Text that Contains.
• In the given field, instead of entering any text, select the cell that you want to use as the search box.

You end up with the same search and format box!

*This will technically not have any impact on the search and format; it’s more like a reminder that the searched value will be highlighted this way (and let’s admit, when you see it working like that, it does look like Excel witchcraft).

Note: Search is not case-sensitive.

This is not where it ends. Likewise, you can enter the search box cell reference with other types of Conditional Formatting Rules too. And why stop at one? You can have multiple search boxes, each bound to a different rule e.g. two search boxes with upper and lower amounts where the upper one is used to highlight greater than quantities and the lower one for less than.

Use custom formats when you don’t want search boxes on the face of the sheet or when Conditional Formatting rules aren’t sufficient for your objective. Such custom formulas can be used for many tasks such as the ones we’ve seen in this tutorial. We’ll list a few examples with formulas that are to be used on the range containing the data:

Highlight Rows Meeting two Separate Conditions

To highlight e.g. those aged under 40 (column B) who took longer than 10 hours (column C) to complete a test:

=AND($B3<40,$C3>10)

Highlight Linear Differences

For highlighting linear differences between two lists:

=$B3<>$C3

Checked Box Strikes Text Through

For striking out tasks (with Strikethrough Font Effects) in a checklist when a checkbox is marked:

=IF(C3=TRUE,TRUE,FALSE)

The prerequisites for this Conditional Formatting rule are that you insert the checkboxes using Form Controls in the Developer tab and link each box to the cell it is in by right-clicking the checkbox, selecting Format Control, and linking the checkbox.

Highlight Cell when Target is Achieved

To highlight a cell when a total is met:

=IF(COUNTA($D$3:$D$20)>=18,TRUE,FALSE)

Enter this formula as a Conditional Formatting rule in the target cell F20. The trick is to enter the text “Daily target achieved!» in white font in F20 so that when the condition is met and the cell is highlighted in a dark color, the white text becomes visible.

Tip: If you find creating such formulas confusing or intimidating, you can apply the basic part of the formula in any free cell and apply Conditional Formatting in reference to that cell e.g. you apply the following formula in cell F19.

=COUNTA(D3:D25)

This will count the occupied cells for you (22 in this case). And then use this formula =$F$19>=18 in Conditional Formatting with F20 selected. Since 22 is greater than 18, F20 will be highlighted by Conditional Formatting which means that you will still achieve the same results.

We’re certain we’ve covered all the major and minor elements regarding Conditional Formatting in Excel as well as where and how it can be applied to achieve various results. Once you get around to using this feature, you’ll find it indispensable to quickly spot trends and anomalies and analyze data without changing its position.

Alright, we’re pretty sure you know that by now so about you try giving your worksheets a Conditional Formatting spin?

Conditional formatting in Excel is used more often because of its useful characteristics. When you need to apply formats to the dataset, conditional formatting is used. Not only this, but you can even highlight the data in the sheet to identify the changes in cell values.

For beginners, conditional formatting sometimes could be complex and vague. For some users, this feature is not a favorite one that’s why often users tend to avoid it. However, this feature is not difficult at all. And it does not take much time. But do you know how to do conditional formatting in Excel? Let’s understand this in detail.

Conditional Formatting Overview

With conditional formatting, you can apply formatting by default such as icons, colors, and data bars. You can apply formatting to one or more cells and it all depends on the cell value. For this, you need to make a conditional formatting rule. Suppose, you have a value less than $2000, and the cell color is red. Once you apply this rule, you can easily find which cells have values less than $2000.

What is Conditional Formatting in Excel?

When you need to apply particular formatting to data that matches one or more conditions, conditional formatting is then used. Similar to standard formatting, you can highlight as well as distinguish data in several ways since it changes the fill color, font color, and border styles of a cell. Generally, this feature is much more dynamic and supple. Conditional formatting is updated by default once the data is changed to reflect the changes.

You can apply conditional formatting to individual cells or entire rows on the bases of the value given in the formatted cell. Preset rules are used to apply conditional format on your data and these rules include data bars, icon sets, color scales, or even you can personalize rules.

How to Do Conditional Formatting in Excel (Highlighting Text)

When you intend to highlight text by using conditional formatting, it simply shows that you need to divert the attention of the users to the cells containing relevant data. You can follow the steps given below to add one of the rules used in conditional formatting:

• Select all the cells in which the text is needed to highlight.
• Here in this example, we will select all cells in column B.

• Open the Home tab and choose the Conditional Formatting option.

• Place the cursor over the “Highlight Cells Rules” option and choose the “Text that Contains” option.

• A dialog box will appear in which you need to add the text that needed to be highlighted in the left field.

• You will instantly notice the conditional formatting is applied as you enter the text.
• The formatting you notice will be standard but you can make changes to it the way you need.
• For this, click on the drop-down arrow given in the right field and choose another formatting preset.
• Or else, you can make a new format by clicking on the custom format.

• Once you click on the Custom Format, you will see a Format Cells dialog box. This dialog box is a normal one as you have applied formatting in a sheet. You can choose whatever formatting style you need.

All set!

Now, you will see all the selected cells are under the effect of the conditional formatting you have applied.

That’s it!

That’s all, now what comes next?

You understand how to do conditional formatting in Excel. Basically, conditional formatting is an important part of the Excel tool that does not need instructions once you create it properly. It by default reviews the cell and responds accordingly.

This tutorial describes the whole concept of Excel conditional formatting with examples and different ways to apply it. You will know when and how to utilize this formatting on every version of Excel.

Undoubtedly, excel conditional formatting is very useful when it comes to formatting data that meets a certain condition. Hence will differentiate and highlights important details on your spreadsheets without spending much time.

For beginners users, it seems so complicated and vague to use it. Apparently, this feature is very easy and straightforward you don’t have to be intimidated and uneasy, once you are familiar with this function it will only take a minute to make it.

What is conditional formatting in Excel

Conditional formatting of excel is used in applying format on the data which meets certain criteria or more conditions. Consequently, it automatically applies formatting such as color, icon and data bars, etc.

Furthermore, it highlights and differentiates data from other cells. Besides it is more practical than normal cell formatting because when the data alter the conditional formatted data automatically updates. Hence it’s more flexible and dynamic to use.

Excel conditional formatting is possible to utilize in every cell or on the entire row based on the value of the formatted cell or another cell. Moreover, there are preset tools you can use like Color Scales, Icon sets and Data Bars. In addition, you can also create custom criteria where you like and how you like the selected cells should be highlighted.

Since excel 2010 throughout 365 version of excel conditional formatting is located in Home Tab >Styles group > Conditional formatting.

After you know where it resides, we’re going to make use of this feature on the worksheet we are working on.

After you know where it resides, we’re going to make use of this feature on the worksheet we are working on. Take note this feature is available in any version of excel you have, so you don.t have any problem with it.

How to use Conditional formatting in Excel

Take note can use any other rule depending on your option.

• Greater than or equal to
• Between two values
• Text that contains specific words or characters
• Date occurring in a certain range
• Duplicate values
• Top/bottom N numbers

Conditional Formatting Formula Excel

Take your Excel skills to the next level and use a formula to determine which cells to format. Formulas that apply conditional formatting must evaluate to TRUE or FALSE.

1. Select the range of cells you want to format using the formula. In our sample it’s G2:G20.

2. On your worksheet Home tab, in the Styles group, click Conditional Formatting. Then when the dropdown list appears, Click New Rule.

3. Select ‘Use a formula to determine which cells to format‘. Then enter the formula =G2:G20=”PASS”. After you select your preferred formatting rule and Click OK.

4. Then the result of all the pass cells will be highlighted as Green.

Excel Conditional Formatting Based on Another Cell

Using conditional formatting in your business logic or analysis does not limit you on a single rule only, actually you can add as many as you need.

For instance, you want all grades with a line of nine to be Yellow and a line of 8 to be green thus the line of 7 is red it will work. All you need to do is to specify them correctly.

If the “greater than 99” rule is placed first, then only the yellow formatting will be applied because the other two rules won’t have a chance to be triggered.

To re-arrange the rules, this is what you need to do:

• Select any cell in your dataset covered by the rules.

• Open Conditional Formatting then Click Manage Rules… to proceed to Rules Manager.

• Click the rule that needs to be applied first, and then use the upward arrow to move it to the top. Do the same for the second-in-priority rule.

• Select the Stop If True check box next to all but the last rule because you do not want the subsequent rules to be applied when the prior condition is met.

Conditional Formatting Presets

Excel has several conditional formatting presets that will help you quickly apply to your data. Mainly it consists of three categories:

• Data Bars: These horizontal bars are inserted into each cell, likely a bar graph.

• Color Scales: The color of each cell changes depending on the value. The color of the scale uses two or three gradients. For instance, on the Green-Yellow-Red color scale, the highest values are green, the average values are yellow, and the lowest values are red.

• Icon Sets: It enters a specific icon on the cell based on its value.

Summary

To sum up, this article about excel conditional formatting includes ways where to apply and examples that clarify the usefulness of conditional formatting.

If you have missed our other tutorials you can visit MS Excel tutorial for more.

See you on our next tutorial. Thank you for reading!

Conditional formatting is a convenient tool for data analysis and visual representation of results. Knowing how to use this tool will save you a lot of time and effort. A fleet glance at the document will be enough to obtain the necessary information.



How to apply conditional formatting in Excel

The tool «HOME»-«Conditional formatting» can be found on the main tab in the «Styles» section. If you click on the little arrow on the right, it will open the menu.

Let’s compare the numerical values in an Excel range with a numerical constant. The rules «Greater Than / Less Than / Equal To / Between…» are the most frequently used. That’s why they’re listed in the menu «Highlight Cells Rules».

Let’s enter some numbers in the range А1:А11.

Select the range of values. Open the menu «Conditional formatting». Select «Highlight Cells Rules». Set a condition, for example, «Greater Than».

Let’s enter the number 15 in the left box. In the drop-down menu on the right select the way of highlighting the values that correspond to the established condition: «Format cells that are GREATER THAN:» 15. The result is plain to see immediately:

Leave this menu by hitting the OK button.



Conditional formatting by a cell’s value

Let’s compare the values in the range А1:А11 with the number in the B2 cell. Enter the number 20 in it.

Select the initial range and open the window of the «Conditional formatting» tool. In this example, let’s apply the condition «less» («Highlight Cells Rules» — «Less Than»).

In the left box, enter the link to the B2 cell (click on this cell and its name will appear in the box automatically). The link’s absolute by default.

The formatting result is plain to see in the Excel sheet immediately.

The values in the А1:А11 range that are less than the value of the B2 cell are filled with the selected color.

Let’s set the following formatting conditions: compare the values of cells in different ranges and highlight the same values. We will compare the column А1:А11 with the column В1:В11.

Select the initial range (А1:А11). Click «Conditional formatting» — «Highlight Cells Rules» — «Equal To». In the left box, enter the link to the B1 cell. The link should be Mixed or Relative! And not absolute!

The program has compared every value in the A column with the corresponding value in the B column. The coinciding values have been highlighted with a fill color.

Important note! When you use relative references, you have to pay attention to which cell was active the moment you opened the «Conditional formatting» tool. Since it’s the active cell to which the reference in the condition is “tied.”

In our example, the A1 cell was active at the moment we opened the tool. The link is $B1. Consequently, Excel compares the value in the A1 cell with the B1 value. If we selected the column from the bottom upwards rather than from top to bottom, the A11 cell would be the active one. And the program would compare B1 with A11.

Compare:

Pay attention to this nuance in order to ensure the «Conditional formatting» tool performs the task properly.

You can do the following to check the accuracy of the established condition:

1. Select the first cell in the range to which conditional formatting is applied.
2. Open the tool’s menu; click «Manage Rules».

In the newly-opened window, you can see which rule is applied to which range.

Conditional formatting – several conditions

The initial range is А1:А11. We need the numbers that are greater than 6 to be highlighted with red. Green for numbers greater than 10. Yellow for values greater than 20.

1. Method: Select the range А1:А11. Apply «Conditional formatting» to it. «Highlight Cells Rules» — «Greater Than». Enter the number 6 in the left box. In the right one, select «Light Red Fill Dark Red Text». Hit OK. Select the range А1:А11 once again. Set the formatting condition as «Format cells that are GREATER THAN:» 10, and choose «Green Fill Dark Green Text». In the same way, set the yellow fill color for numbers greater than 20.



2. Method: Go to the menu of the «Conditional formatting» tool and select «New Rule». Fill in the formatting parameters for the first condition. Click OK. Likewise, set the second and third formatting conditions:

Note: the values in some cells simultaneously corresponds to two or more conditions. The highlighting priorities depend on the order of the rules listed in «Rules Manager».

That is, the number 24, which is simultaneously greater than 6, 10, and 20, is highlighted in accordance with the condition «=$А1>20» (the first one on the list).

Conditional formatting of dates in Excel

Select the range containing the dates.

Apply «Highlight Cells Rules»-«A Date Occurring» to it.

In the newly-opened window, you can seen the list of available conditions (rules):

Select the suitable one (for instance, for the last 7 days) and click OK.

The red fill color highlights the cells containing the dates within the past week (the date when this article was written is March 3, 2017).

Conditional formatting in Excel using formulas

If the standard rules are not sufficient for the task, the user can apply a formula. The capabilities of this instrument are limitless, so virtually any formula can be used. Let’s view a simple variant.

We have a column containing numbers. We need the cells with even numbers to be highlighted with a color. We will use the formula: =MOD(A1,2)

Select the range containing the numbers and open the «Highlight Cells Rules» menu. Select «New Rules». Click «Use a formula to determine which cells to format». Fill in the box as follows:

Click Ok to close the window and view the result.

Conditional formatting of the row by a cell’s value

The task is to highlight the row containing a cell with a certain value.

The exemplary table:

We need to highlight in red the information on the projects in progress («Underway»). For the completed projects’ data («Completed»), the green fill in color should be applied.

Select the range containing the table values A2:D12. Click «Highlight Cells Rules»-«New Rule». Choose a formula as the type of condition. We will use the function: =IF().

The order of filling in the formatting conditions for «Completed projects».

Underway:

Completed:

Note: links to a row are absolute; links to a cell are mixed (only the column is fixed).

Likewise, set the formatting rules for the projects in progress.

In «Rules Manager», the conditions appear as follows:

The obtained result:

When the formatting parameters are set for the entire range, the condition will be fulfilled as soon as the cells are filled in. For example, let’s complete Caroline project dated January 28 by replacing «Underway» with «Completed».

The highlight has changed automatically. It would have taken you a while to achieve this result using the standard Excel tools.