Color draws our eyes and attention to things: stop signs are red, construction workers wear yellow, and sticky notes are bright and colorful. You too can use color to draw attention to your data with Excel's conditional formatting feature. Conditional formatting uses rules to color code your data - updating the colors as your data changes.
Check out this quick video tip about conditional formatting in Microsoft Excel from the Affinity Insight course live training session Excel - Readily Readable Data.
To get started, select the cells that you want to be conditionally formatted. On the Home ribbon, in the Styles group, click on Conditional Formatting to see your options.
Amounts Greater Than or Less Than a Certain Amount
If you have a list of numbers (perhaps fair market values of assets in an estate or marital property in a divorce) and need to know if any of them are worth more than a certain amount, conditional formatting can do that.
Specific Values
If you want to draw attention to cells with a specific value (perhaps real property in an estate or cells containing "N/A"), conditional formatting can do that.
Highest or Lowest Amounts
If you have a list of numbers (perhaps a list of attorneys and their billable hours) and want to quickly see which ones are the largest or smallest, conditional formatting can do that. You can conditionally format a certain percentage or a certain number of cells that fall at the top or bottom of the range.
Color Scales
You can use color scales to color code a series of numbers based on their values. When color coding using red, yellow, green, the largest number is green and the smallest number is red. The numbers in between are assigned a shade based on where they fall between the lowest and highest numbers.
Custom Rules
You can even set up conditional formatting to work based on custom rules that you create.
Managing Rules
You can apply multiple rules to the same cells. The Rules Manager allows you control the order in which they apply.
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