Many of us use spreadsheets to manage huge lists of data, like customer data bases, salesperson data bases etc.
Today we will learn a little conditional formatting trick that you can use to search a worksheet full of data and highlight the matching cells.
First identify which cell you want to use as search bar. Lets say we choose F4.
Now, Select the data cells you want to search and go to conditional formatting.
We will write a simple formula that returns true if a cell has the content you typed in the search bar (F4) and false if the cell doesnt. You can try something like ISERROR(FIND(LOWER($F$4),LOWER(B7)))=FALSE.
But there is a problem with this, it returns true when the search bar is empty, and thus you end up highlighting all cells. So we add a further condition that will highlight the matched cells only if the search bar contains some data.
The formula looks like,
=AND($F$4<>"",ISERROR(FIND(LOWER($F$4),LOWER(B7)))=FALSE)
Finally set the formatting you want to use. I choose dull orange color. You can choose blue, green or pink too.
Hit ok and you are good to go.
Additional Material on Conditional Formatting:
Excel Conditional Formatting Basics
Highlight Top 10 Items in a List using Conditional Formatting
5 Rock Star Conditional Formatting Tips
11 Responses to “Fix Incorrect Percentages with this Paste-Special Trick”
I've just taught yesterday to a colleague of mine how to convert amounts in local currency into another by pasting special the ROE.
great thing to know !!!
Chandoo - this is such a great trick and helps save time. If you don't use this shortcut, you have to take can create a formula where =(ref cell /100), copy that all the way down, covert it to a percentage and then copy/paste values to the original column. This does it all much faster. Nice job!
I was just asking peers yesterday if anyone know if an easy way to do this, I've been editing each cell and adding a % manually vs setting the cell to Percentage for months and just finally reached my wits end. What perfect timing! Thanks, great tip!
If it's just appearance you care about, another alternative is to use this custom number format:
0"%"
By adding the percent sign in quotes, it gets treated as text and won't do what you warned about here: "You can not just format the cells to % format either, excel shows 23 as 2300% then."
Dear Jon S. You are the reason I love the internet. 3 year old comments making my life easier.
Thank you.
Here is a quicker protocol.
Enter 10000% into the extra cell, copy this cell, select the range you need to convert to percentages, and use paste special > divide. Since the Paste > All option is selected, it not only divides by 10000% (i.e. 100), it also applies the % format to the cells being pasted on.
@Martin: That is another very good use of Divide / Multiply operations.
@Tony, @Jody: Thank you 🙂
@Jon S: Good one...
@Jon... now why didnt I think of that.. Excellent
Thank You so much. it is really helped me.
Big help...Thanks
Thanks. That really saved me a lot of time!
Is Show Formulas is turned on in the Formula Ribbon, it will stay in decimal form until that is turned off. Drove me batty for an hour until I just figured it out.