Applying Conditional Formatting

You can make your worksheets more powerful by setting up conditional formatting, which lets the value of a cell determine its formatting. For example, you might want this year’s sales total to be displayed in red and italics if it’s less than last year’s total, but in green and bold if it’s more. The formatting is applied to the cell values only if the values meet the condition that you specify. Otherwise, no conditional formatting is applied to the cell values. With Excel, you can apply conditional formatting only to cells that contain text, number, or date or time values. You can quickly format only top or bottom ranked values, values above or below average, unique or duplicate values, or use a formula to determine which cells to format. You can also apply multiple formatting to the same data in order to achieve the results you want (New!). In addition, you can refer to values in other worksheets (New!).

Format Cell Contents Based on Comparison

Select a cell or range you want to conditionally format.

Click the Home tab.

Click the Conditional Formatting button, and then point to Highlight Cell Rules.

Click the comparison rule you want to apply to conditionally format the selected data.

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• Greater Than.
  
  
• Less Than.
  
  
• Between.
  
  
• Equal To.
  
  
• Text that Contains.
  
  
• A Date Occurring.
  
  
• Duplicate Values.
  
  

Specify the criteria you want. Each rule supplies different criteria.

Click OK.