Conditional Formatting in Excel – 5 Tips to make you a Rockstar

Excel conditional formatting is a hidden and powerful gem that when used well, can change the outlook of your project report / sales budget / project plan or analytical outputs from bunch of raw data in default fonts to something truly professional and good looking. Better still, you dont even need to be a guru or excel pro to achieve dramatic results. All you need is some coffee and this post to learn some cool conditional formatting tricks.

So you got your coffee mug? well, lets start!

The 5 tricks we are going to learn are,

1. Highlighting alternative rows / columns in tables

2. No-nonsense project plans / gantt charts

3. Extreme Incell graphs

4. Highlight mistakes, errors, omissions, repetitions

5. Create intuitive dashboards

If you are new to Excel Conditional Formatting, please read the Conditional Formatting Basics article before proceeding.

I have created an excel sheet containing all these examples. Feel free to download the excel and be a conditional formatting rock star

 

1. Highlighting alternative rows / columns in tables:

Often when you present data in a large table it looks monotonous and is difficult to read. This is because your eyes start interpreting the data as grid instead of some important numbers. To break this you try highlighting or changing the background color of alternative rows / columns. But how would you do this if you have rather large table and it keeps changing. The trick lies in Conditional Formatting. (Of course you can use the built-in auto format feature, but we all know how the default settings of various Microsoft products are like).

• First select data part of the table you want to format.
• Go to Conditional formatting dialog (Menu > Format > Conditional Formatting)
• Change the “cell value is” to “formula is” (YES, you can base your formatting outcome on formulas instead of cell values)
• Now, if you want to highlight alternative rows, the formula can go something like this,
  =MOD(ROW(),2)=0
which means, whenever row() of the current cell is even, to change the coloring to odd rows, you just need to put =MOD(ROW(),2)=1 as formula
Also, if you want to highlight alternative columns instead of rows you can use the column() formula.
What if you want to change background color of every 3rd row instead, just use =MOD(ROW(),3)=0 instead. Just use your imagination.

• Set the format as you like, in my case I have used yellow color. When you are done, the dialog should look something like this:
  
• Click OK.
• Congratulations, you have mastered a conditional formatting trick now

 

2. Creating a quick project plan / gantt chart using conditional formatting:

 

Project plans / gantt charts are everyday activity in most of our lives. Creating a simple and snazzy project plan template in excel is not a difficult job, using conditional formatting a bit of formulas you can do it no time.

• First create a table structure like shown above, with columns like Activity, start and end day, day 1, 2,3, etc…
• Now, whenever a day falls between start and end day for a corresponding activity, we need to highlight that row. For that we need to identify whether a day falls between start and end. We can do that with the below formulas,
  =IF(AND(F$8>=$D9, F$8<=$E9),"1","")
Which means, whenever, the day number represented on the top row is between start and end we will in 1 in the corresponding cell.

• Next, whenever the cell value is 1, we will just fill the cell with a favorite color and change the font to same color, so that we dont see anything but a highlighted cell, better still, whenever you change the start or end dates, the color will change automatically. This will be done by conditional formatting like below:
  
• Congratulations, you have mastered the art of creating excel gantt charts now

 

3. Extreme In-cell Graphs:

Incell graphing is a nifty trick that basically uses REPT() function (used to repeat a string, character given number of times) to generate bar-charts with in a cell. You can apply conditional formatting on top of them to give the charts a good effect. Here is a sample:



The above is a table of visits to Pointy Haried Dilbert in the month of January 2008. As you can see I have highlighted (by changing the font color to red and making it bold) for the cells that have more than average number of visits in the month. I am not going to tell you how to do it, it is your home work

4. Highlight mistakes / errors / omissions / repetitions using conditional formatting:

Often we will do highly monotonous job like typing data in a sheet. Since the work is monotonous you tend to make mistakes, omit a few or repeat something etc. This can be avoided by conditional formatting. I use this trick whenever I am typing something or pasting a formula over a rather large range of cells (for eg. vlookup on annual revenue data of all your accounts, could run in to thousands of rows across multiple states /regions etc.).

Lets see how you can highlight a cell when it has an error:

• First select the cells that you want to search for errors
• Next go to menu > format > conditional formatting and mention the formula as: =iserror() (see below)
  
• In the same way you track repetitions, a simple countif() would do the magic for you, or Omissions (again a countif())
• Thats it, you have learned how to save tons of time by letting excel do the job for you. Sit back and sip that coffee before it gets cold.

5. Creating dash boards using excel conditional formatting:

As I said before you can use conditional formatting to create intuitive sales reports or analytics outputs. Like the one shown here,



Here is how you can do it:

• Copy your data table to a new table.
• Empty the data part and replace it with formula that can go like this (I am using the above table format to write these formulas, may change for your data)
  =ROUND(C10,0) & " " & IF(C9 Essentially, what we are doing is, whenever the cell value is more than its predecessor in the data table we are appending the symbol â–² (go to menu > insert > symbols and look for the above one) etc.

• Next, conditionally change the color of cell to red / green / blue or pink (if you want ) and you are done
• Show it to your boss, bask in the glory

I have created an excel sheet containing all these examples. Feel free to download the excel and be a conditional formatting rock star.

Excel Conditional Formatting Basics

What is excel conditional formatting ?

Conditional formatting is your way of telling excel to format all the cells that meet a criteria in a certain way. For eg. you can use conditional formatting to change the font color of all cells with negative values or change background color of cells with duplicate values.

Why use conditional formatting?

Of course, you can manually change the formats of cells that meet a criteria. But this a cumbersome and repetitive process. Especially if you have large set of values or your values change often. That is why we use conditional formatting. To automatically change formatting when a cell meets certain criteria.

Few Examples of Conditional Formatting

 Here are 3 examples of conditional formatting.

So How do I Apply Conditional Formatting?

This is very simple. First select the cells you want to format conditionally. Click on menu >
format > conditional formatting or the big conditional formatting button in Excel 2007.

(we have used excel 2003 in this tutorial, but conditional formatting is similar in excel 2007 with lots of additional features)

You will see a dialog like this:

There are 2 types of conditions:

• Cell value based conditions: These conditions are tested on the cell value itself. So if you select a bunch of cells, and mention the condition as between 15 and 25, all the cells with values between 15 and 25 are formatted as you specify.
• Formula based conditions: Sometimes you need more flexibility than a few simple conditions. That is when formulas come handy. Conditional Formatting Formulas are slightly complicated and can be difficult to learn or use if you are new to excel. But they are very useful and intuitive and if you use them once you get a hang of it.

What are the limitations of Conditional Formatting?

In earlier versions of Excel you can only define max. of 3 conditions. This is no longer true if you are using Excel 2007.
However, you can overcome the conditional formatting limitation using VBA macros (again, if you are new to excel, you may want to wait few weeks before plunging in to VBA)
Also, you can only use conditional formatting with cells and not with other objects like charts.

Ok, Enough Theory, Time for your First Conditional Formatting

Go ahead, open a new workbook and try few conditional formats yourself. See how easy and intuitive it is. Use it in your day to day work and impress your colleagues. Learn 5 impressive tricks about conditional formatting.
If you have trouble getting started, download the conditional formatting examples workbook.

Tell us how YOU use Conditional Formatting

Share with us how you use CF in your work. I am sucker for conditional formatting and use it wherever I can. What about you?

Create in-cell pie charts in Excel

Here is a ridiculously easy trick to do nice incell pie charts in excel, what more, they will make you look like a charting wizard.

1. Download free pie chart font from here (direct download link). The font has 21 pie chart codes starting with empty circle (character ‘a’) and ending with full circle (character ‘u’)
2. Install the font (just extract the zip file, copy the font file to your fonts folder, click here to learn how to install a font in windows)
3. Open excel, go to your data table and insert a column where you want incell pie charts
4. Enter a formula like =CHAR(CODE("a") + ROUND(data cell*21,1)), just replace the data cell with actual cell code.
5. Finally change the font to “pie charts for maps” from font dialog.
6. There is no step 6, so go ahead and show off this cool table to your colleagues, make their jaws drop in awe.

You can add some conditional formatting to the pie charts like I did to make it nice.

Creating in-cell bar charts / histograms in excel

Ever since writing the create in-cell pie charts in excel, I have been itching to find a simple enough method to do incell bar graphs. An in-cell bar would probably be more useful and cuter than an in-cell pie as it can instantly provide trending details. What more, these would probably look gorgeous when printed out.

My first challenge was that there was no font readily available for bar graphs. Thankfully this is when I noticed Font Struct, an online font creator / editor. I quickly created a bar graph font using their wonderful editor. When you use bargraph font, 0 through 9 will show bars of increasing heights, as shown below.

You should download bargraph font if you want to use incell bar graphing technique mentioned here.
Once you have downloaded the font, the rest is simple process. For this example, lets use fictitious sales data of various beverages over the last 12 months. The initial data table is something like this:

1.  First we will insert a column next to the total sales column and call it “last 12 months”. We will use this column to fill up the in-cell bar graph for the last 12 month sales. 
2.  Next we need to normalize the sales values for each month to a value between 0 to 9. I have used linear normalization, ie the maximum value across the 12 months would be 9 and everything else will be normalized according this. The formula for one month looked something like this: =ROUND(jan_sales/MAX(all_sales)*9,0). Remember, we need to round the data make it one digit instead of a decimal.
3. Once we have normalized values for each of 12 sales figures for each row, we just need to concatenate them to create a 12 character long string of numbers and place this values in our newly inserted column
4. Finally, we will change the font of this column to “bargraph” (just select all the cells under the “last 12 months” and change the font) When we are finally done, our table should look something like this:
   
   
   
   
   Thats all, we now have a charming data table with cute little incell bar graphs to insert your project report / sales memo or news letter.

 Feel free to download example excel sheet I have created and learn how to do in-cell bar graphs

Remember, you need to have the bargraph font installed first. 

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