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 Chandoo.org 😉 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.
More DIY Excel Training:
» Excel for Beginners – Tutorials
» Excel Formula Examples
» Pivot Tables
» Project Management using Excel
» Excel Dashboards
» Advanced Excel
35 Responses to “75 Excel Speeding up Tips Shared by YOU! [Speedy Spreadsheet Week]”
I see most are saying that array formulas are bad. But I thought that when you use array formulas it grabs all the data at once and performs the calculations in one fell swoop. At least that is how the UDFs that I created work. When I did the time test it was much faster that way. Maybe I'll go back and check to make sure my work is right, but that's what I did.
When I work with array formulas I get a full column of data then work on that column and return a full column of data all at once. Which has shown to be much faster than the alternative.
Anyone have special insights on this?
wow..! thats a pretty impressive list, some real gems in there. I read somewhere the other day that spreadsheet development should be 80% planning and 20% implementation - taking the time to think about layout, how you're going to calculate things and how to structure the data often results in a lot less headaches, and more time for deeper analysis...
Hi Chandoo...
Mixed feeling about this article, while I completely agree with you when you share everyone's points under their name giving credit to contributors, but at the same time I see alot of repeated tips and few those may not be applicable under all cases. (I may have sounded harsh). Some kind of sorting of tips were required than mere 3 categorization. (Tough ask, I know). Some really worthy and awesome tips get lost in occean.
I would have been happy to read only non repititive tips and more like standard chandoo articles.
Well, I have also got two tips (may get lost in the list above), which is not presented above:
1. When using too many pivots - Disable data drilling option. This reduces file size, cache memory and speeds up file.
2. If your macro has used too many files for gathering input, close the file and open. This is also release or kill unwanted space in memory and speeds up. Again this can be achieved by macro to close self file and reopen same file, using timer function.
Please do not count me negative.
Regards,
Prasad DN
Hey, one thing that really speeds up VBA processing of data is to extract ranges into arrays & then working on those arrays. Arrays are a lot faster than using cell offset or any other method for working with a database. After you are done you can also paste the value directly into the range with one single command. This will speed up the macros considerably.
Here is a msdn article with examples in it:
msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa139976(v=office.10).aspx
Hope this helps
oops, noticed a typo in the tip I posted:
Re directly assigning values in VBA rather than copying & pasting should have read:
Sheet2.Range( "B1:B200 ").Value= Sheet1.Range( "A1:A200 ").Value
not
Sheet2.Range( "B1:B200 ").Value= Sheet1.Range( "A1:A100 ").Value
Corrected with double quotes:
Sheet2.Range("B1:B200").Value= Sheet1.Range("A1:A200").Value
[...] posts on speeding up Excel worksheets, one of the posts focuses on formulas and another he let the general readers make their suggestions. I made the suggestion that people use array formulas. But most of the other suggestions said not [...]
OK, I tested it. My UDFs were faster as array functions (like a couple thousand times). But Excel's built in functions are faster when not doing arrays. Not sure this is the case for all situations.
I can't help but to speak up.
Deleting a PivotTable will not speed up your workbook. It will only reduce the file size. There is zero memory processing for a pivot table if it just sits there.
Instead of destroying the pivot table, why not remove the redundant raw data. That would equally reduce the file size of the workbook, while keeping the pivot table functionality.
http://datapigtechnologies.com/blog/index.php/cut-the-size-of-your-pivot-table-workbooks-in-half/
Thanks a lot guys for your valuable tips !!
It really worked for me
Application.ScreenUpdating = False
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
...
...
...
Application.ScreenUpdating = True
Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
I would add:
Application.StatusBar = "Wait a second..."
............
Application.StatusBar = False
Optimizing Speed using Pivot Tables:
If you find that Pivot Tables are becoming sluggish becomes of the sheer volume of tables there is a way to increase performance. By default (xls 2010) pivot tables are designed to autofit the data within the columns as well as preserving formatting. I discovered that unchecking these two options alone will exponentially increase performance.
Here's how to do it:
Right click on your pivot table(s) --->choose 'Pivot Table Options' -->Layout & Format' Tab --->uncheck two boxes at the bottom. Done!
here is my list:
1. Avoid Variants when possible
2. Use long instead of integer
3. Use double instead of single
4. Use booleans as much as possible
5. pull data into arrays, manipulate, then dump back to workbook
6. use .value2 instead of .value if you are looking at strings or numeric values
7. set object variables
dim Wks as Excel.Worksheet
set wks = thisworkbook.Sheets("Sheet1")
8. use with statements...
with wks.cells(x,y)
.value2 = "abcd"
.interior.colorindex=4
with .font
.bold=true
.size =20
.underline=xlunderlinestylesingle
end with
9. use string version of functions (Left$() instead of Left())
10. Test for empty string variables with len() or lenb()...if lenb(String1)=0 then
11. Use the Mid$() function if it is possible instead of split()
12. use the join$() function instead of concatenating strings
13. AscW() to evaluate first characters
14. combine if statements and booleans together
boolean = (lenb(String1) = 0)
16. InStr(), InStrB(), InStrRev() are very fast, InStr() can be used to quickly return a substring occurrence of a string
17. DICTIONARIES!!!!!!!!!!!
18. FileSystemObject
19. My machine runs slightly faster when i fill in all the inputs of a function (instead of InStrB(String1, "abcd"), i use (InStrB(1,String1,"abcd",vbBinaryCompare)
20. Short Circuit If statements: If x = 2 then if y >3 then if z = 5 then b=true or
if x=2 then
if y >3 then
if z=5 then
b=true
c=true
end if
end if
end if
21. use ElseIf
22. my testing indicates ElseIf is slightly faster than a Case Select
23. set strings to empty by: = vbnullstring
24. with application
.screenupdating = false
.displayalerts = false
.enableevents = false
end with
25. UserForms can be very beneficial
26. User-Defined Types are a very neat way to encapsulate data
27. User-Defined Functions are handy, but can increase run-time if called thousands of times
28. if using ElseIfs, nested And Ifs or Select Case statements, put the argument that will occur most frequently at the beginning
29. Looping is not the worst thing...just got to figure out how to do it the most efficiently
30. Use dynamic arrays instead of static arrays
31. if you can figure out Win32 APIs, then they are usually much faster than VBA functions
I worked on a massive spreadsheet and it had become very slow over time as I developed it. I tried stripping down more and more formulas by replacing with pasted values, removed all conditional formatting etc. In the end what finally did the trick was when I removed the last single SUMPRODUCT fomula. It changed the updating time after one change from 7-8 seconds to instantaneously. The SUMPRODUCT I had used the full columns, and if I put it to only look at rows 1-500 it was fine.
[...] Speeding up Excel – 75 tips [Visitors: 36,157 ] Using Excel as your database [ 32,455 ] Comprehensive guide to VLOOKUP [ 23,745 ] 66 Dashboards visualizing Excel salary survey data [ 26,148 ] Interactive Sales chart in Excel [ 21,444 ] Compare 2 Excel sheets – howto? [ 21,820 ] Send mails using Excel VBA & Outlook [ 22,294 ] Customer Service Dashboard in Excel [ 18,136 ] Making your dashboards interactive [ 15,294 ] Extract numbers from text in Excel [ 18,490 ] [...]
TIPS FOR SPEEDING UP EXCEL
(1) Instead of writing a lot of formulas to organise data, you can VLOOKUP() the data in a Pivot table, thereby combining the advantages of Pivot table and VOOKUP().
(2) If you have a range named ‘TotalTaxForTheCurrentFinancialYear’, then it is not compulsory to use this name when making the worksheet. Naming the range as ‘Tax’ or simply ‘T’ will be sufficient. The formula =SUM(T) will be shorter and easier to use.
After completing typing all the formulas, simply edit the name of the range from ‘T’ to ‘TotalTaxForTheCurrentFinancialYear’, in the name box. The formula =SUM(T) will automatically change to =SUM(TotalTaxForTheCurrentFinancialYear).
Vijaykumar Shetye, India
VBA
I don't write many macros and like most of you when doing a recalculation it sometimes takes forever.
I have found that when I looked at my spreadsheet, I could determine which order of calcuations (by column) would produce the least number of iterations. So I wrote a macro to do my calculations on my terms. I picked the order of the columns I wanted to calcuate and it sped up my recalc 5-10X.
I did this so long ago, I believe I used "expression .Calculate".
TIPS TO SPEED UP EXCEL by Vijaykumar Shetye, India
You can view all the formulas in the entire worksheet quickly by pressing [ctrl] and [~] keys simultaneously.
To view results, press the key combination again.
i need help about excle lerning and reports making with dash bord i have no facility to join the on classes.
sajjad.hussain165@gmail.com
Is there any command to get time with seconds
Is there any way to create an excel file for specific time period, afterwards it will not open
[...] are looking for , but give it a try : Optimize Slow VBA Code. Speed Up Efficient VBA Code/Macros 75 Excel Speeding up Tips - How to speed-up & optimize slow Excel workbooks? | Chandoo.org - Lea... [...]
I've had to do a lot of mass calculations for reports etc. that involved repetitive identical, yet complex formulae, which took forever...
I hit on a great time-saver: sort the spreadsheet data; if, for example, the same result was due to a lookup of Hotel Name (A column), Date (B column), and Room Type (F column), the formula (Z column) would be: "=IF(A2&B2&F2=A1&B1&F1,Z1,VLOOKUP(A2&B2&F2,LookUps!A:G,7,FALSE))".
This meant that if the result is the same as the row above, just use the same answer, thus saving loads of time instead of VLOOKUPs. (This is a simplified example, the actual one had INDIRECT(ADDRESS...) in it, too!)
Check files for invalid range names, invalid links and names that aren't needed any longer.
Clearing out some 200 old references in a template made the file open go from 30 seconds to 2.
You can improve the speed by stopping calculation during changing cell value and after that you can enable it. please follow the link.
http://webtech-training.blogspot.in/2013/10/how-to-stop-heavy-formula-calculation.html
[…] 75 Excel Speeding Tips Its a long List, many repeated but worth a visit. […]
[…] 75 Speed-up tips by Chandoo (smartly done by crowd sourcing) […]
[…] Are you opening slow excel files? Use this reference to speed up your excel sheets […]
If you want to highlight the content or result within a cell with colour, use content colour not cell fill colour. This make a large data sheet fast as full colour takes up more resource.
There are already so many useful replies, so don't be mad at me if I repeat someone with the following hints.
While using pivot tables:
1. Link (raw) data from external files, rather then building pivots in the same workbook of the data. => Reduces file size.
2. don't flag "keep source data" in pivot settings. => reduces cache.
Downside is when you want to use slicers, you must allow refresh of the source data and thus people need access to that file.
One extra when using tables above ranges: replace the table header references by cell references in heavy duty formulas. I'm not sure but it seems to be faster and lighter (in #MBs).
hi
iam student and need xloptimizer( no demo) for solving the mathematical model
can you help me
thanks alot
@Reza
We cannot give away XLoptimizer
Why not post a question in the Chandoo.org Forums
http://forum.chandoo.org/
Dear Sir,
Thanks a lot for sharing tips & tricks of excel....
I read it , understand it and then use it in job and that has helped me a lot....
Thanks a lot...
Himanshu.
Mumbai, India.
In VBA, send out values to the worksheet all together as an array then excel will only re-calculate once rather than each time a cell that is output.
to the guy who said avoid looping in VBA - easier said than done, it's one of the most powerful uses for VBA out there. I'd therefore recomend the half way house and break the loop as soon as you've got what you want, don't let it run until the end. Use While etc.
What I would say on VBA in general is minimise sheet to code interations. Suck all your data into a VBA array THEN do the maths don't use cells themselves as stand alone visual variables.
And to the lady who said it's faster offline - that's because Microsoft are constantly contacting their own website be it security verification and/or update checks
Apply some logic to the order of criteria in sumifs / countifs formula
order the most exclusive criteria first. Once one criteria fails the others do not execute.
Bing AI, given the following query, confirms this: "excel countifs. if one criteria is likely to exclude most of the data range then should this criteria go first in the list to prevent frivilous executions".