Conditional formatting enables spreadsheet users to do a number of things. First and foremost, it calls attention to important data points such as deadlines, at-risk tasks, or budget items. It can also make large data sets more digestible by breaking up the wall of numbers with a visual organizational component. Originally a powerful feature of Excel, other spreadsheet applications have also adopted this functionality. Watch the demo to see how you can more effectively manage your team, projects, and processes with real-time work management in Smartsheet.
Watch a free demo. Before we walk you through creating and applying conditional formatting, you should understand the basics of how it works. The following structural aspects of Excel conditional formatting will guide how you create and apply rules:. Overall, applying conditional formatting is an easy way to keep you and your team members up to date with your data - calling visual attention to important dates and deadlines, tasks and assignments, budget constraints, and anything else you might want to highlight.
When applied correctly, conditional formatting will make you more productive by reducing time spent manually combing data and making it easier to identify trends, so you can focus on the big decisions. This step-by-step walkthrough will show you how to apply the most commonly used preset rules in Excel Tip: You can only apply conditional formatting in the desktop version of Excel.
Excel for Office , the cloud-based web application, allows you to view conditional formatting, but not edit or apply new rules. Highlight rules apply color formatting to cells that meet specific criteria that you define.
They are the most basic type of conditional formatting rule, and Excel provides a variety of preset highlight functions. Using these same steps and menu options, you can apply highlight rules to find Duplicate Values , Dates , or values that are Greater than… , Equal to… , or Between… values that you select.
All of these possibilities are available through the menu options. These rules allow you to call attention to the top or bottom range of cells, which you can specify by number, percentage, or average. Data bars apply a visual bar within each cell. The length of the bar relates the value of the cell to other cell values in the selected range.
However, instead of representing this relationship by the length of a bar, color scales do so with color gradients. Icon sets apply colorful icons to data. They are simply another way to call attention to important data, and relate cells to one another. However, you might want to edit some of these rules later on, or delete them completely. You now have everything need to create basic conditional formatting using presets in Excel Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-inspired work management tool that also provides conditional formatting.
As a cloud-based application, you can apply, edit, and remove rules in real-time, from any device. This how-to section will show you how to do every function described in the previous Excel section, with some modifications that better align with Smartsheet features. You can create spreadsheets in Smartsheet two ways: by manually entering data into Smartsheet, or by importing an existing spreadsheet from programs like Excel and MS Project. Progress Bars are a symbol that you can apply to cells to show and compare the level of completeness.
Tip: You can also automate progress bars by using an if-then formula in Smartsheet. For more information on how to do this, check out this resource on symbol formulas. Instead, you can add informative icons to your data by creating a special Symbols column. Tip: You can also disable a rule by clicking Disable Rule from the dropdown menu and then clicking OK. Now you know how to use conditional formatting and other colors and symbols to add formatting to your sheet in Smartsheet.
For more advanced Excel users, familiarize yourself with the following conditional formatting functions to add even more customization to your spreadsheet. We will use the same data set in this section that we used in the previous Excel tutorial. In some instances, you might want to stop a certain condition, without deleting the entire rule. The Stop if true rule in Excel enables you to do so. The AND formula is one of the most popular, easy-to-use formulas.
It lets you add multiple conditions within a single rule, rather than writing out each rule separately. To format cells they must meet both conditions. This example is just one of hundreds of different formulas you could enter with the AND function. For more information on using Excel formulas with conditional formatting, click here.
While data validation is not technically monitored through conditional formatting rules, you can use it to a similar effect: controlling the formatting of your sheet. You can apply data validation to ensure that any cell-type only allows certain entries text or numbers only, text length, etc. As you accumulate conditional formatting rules, watch out for rule hierarchy.
Since you can apply multiple conditions to a cell or row , they occasionally conflict. When this happens, Excel has default precedence rules that may cause one rule to override another, so you can lose your formatting.
To combat this, you can change the hierarchy of the rules. Adjusting rule hierarchy in Excel is straightforward, but you should also understand the logic behind rule precedence:. To perform the AND function, you can simply click to add multiple conditions to any conditional formatting rule. For an introduction on how to use formulas, check out this resource. Smartsheet also makes it easy to apply conditional formatting based on another cell. Instead of using complicated formulas to reference different cells, you can simply control which cells to pull from and format with a few clicks.
Tip: To eliminate visual redundancy, you can hide the Qty. Status column in your sheet. Simply right-click the column and click Hide column. You now have all the calculations you need in your CAS Grades spreadsheet. There is a lot of data here. To make it easier to pick out the most important pieces of data, Excel provides Conditional Formatting. The best thing about Conditional Formatting is that it is flexible, applying specified formatting only when certain conditions are met.
Excel places blue bars on top of your values; long blue bars for larger numbers, shorter ones for smaller numbers. This makes it easier to see how well each student did in the class — without having to look at the specific numbers. If the text for a student is Pass we want the cell to be formatted with a yellow fill with dark yellow text. You do not have to use the default styles to make your data stand out.
You can set any formatting you want. When you do, it is probably a good idea to include other styling in addition to color. Your spreadsheet might be printed in black and white. You would hate to lose your Conditional formatting.
No problem, you can still follow the exact same steps. After this tip, the only thing you need to do is click a few times with your mouse. You can even follow along as we go with this sample file, which I strongly recommend you do. The first thing you need to do is to select your quantity column. So if you enter , something will happen when the value is less than If you want to change that and you probably will click the drop-down arrow next to the right box and select one of the other presets.
Now you can easily identify specific value intervals in your data — in this case, 0 to This technique can be applied to many other situations, and perhaps a situation where you need to identify cells that have certain text in it.
You can use the same method to pinpoint exactly where a certain string of text is. Instead, we can let conditional formatting do all the hard work and identify the results easily ourselves.
Select some data with text. 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. This can create immense confusion and on top of that, it can make your workbook slow.
In this case, you need to delete some if not all of the rules in the sheet. That was pretty easy. Sometimes some rules should still apply.
You need to pick 8 items that you have the least amount of in stock — and it has to be done in 15 minutes before office hours ends. How can you make it in time? The length of the bar is based on the value of the cell compared to the rest of the selected cells.
So a short bar means the value is low compared to the rest of the cells and a long bar means the value is high compared to the rest of the cells. In this case, we want to visualize the quantity in stock in column C — so we select range C4:C You can also choose to set your color scales up with 3 colors, so the value in the middle of the data is assigned this 3 rd color. When you hover the mouse over the different options you can see the colors change in the selected range E4:E Simply pick the setting you like the most and click it.
This means it can do the job for you very quickly and save you a lot of time, but sometimes you need to be more careful with your data and supervise which entries that are removed. Select the data that you want to find duplicate values in. Scroll down to the end of the sample data. One of the things I use conditional formatting to the most is hiding values that are zero. This can be done in several ways. One of the common ways is to change the Excel settings so all zero values are hidden.
Additionally, you can select specific ranges of your data to be hidden if the values are zero and other places you can choose to see the zero values. Now all zeros disappear from the sheet, because the font color of all zeros are changed to match the cell color.
What I mean by this is that if you highlight all cells that are above a certain value, it could be clever if that specific value was not typed into the rule, but entered in a cell that the rule is referring to. That means that you can change the value without having to edit the rule — just by entering another value in a cell. Now you see that most of the cells are formatted the way we chose earlier I chose a red font.
These cells are more than 60 days before the date in cell E1 14 th of October A single cell is hard to see if there are a lot of columns in your data. Entire rows look nice when they are formatted in a certain way.
Instead of random colored cells everywhere. First we need to establish these two dates. Like this:. When using several conditional formatting rules at the same time in the same sheet , even on the same range of cells, trouble can arise.
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