SubscribeHighlight due dates in Excel – Show items due, overdue and completed in different colors
Congratulations to you if your job does not involve dead lines. For the rest of us, deadlines are the sole motivation for working (barring free internet & the coffee machine in 2nd floor, of course). So today, lets talk about a very familiar problem.
How to highlight due dates in Excel?
The item can be an invoice, a to do activity, a project or anything.
The problem – Highlight due dates in Excel
Lets say you work at Awesome inc. and you have list of to-do items as shown below.
And your problem is,
- Highlight items & due dates, subject to these conditions
- And of course start working on the items that are due
The Solution – Conditional Formatting
As you can guess, highlighting the due items is easier than actually doing them. First lets look at the solution and then learn why it works.
Lets assume that,
- The data is in the range – B6:D15, with Items (column B), Due date (C) and Completed?(D)
Solution
- Select the entire range (B6:D15) and from home ribbon select conditional formatting
- Select New rule
- Select the rule type as “use a formula…”
- To highlight completed activities
- Now write =$D6=”Yes”
- And set font color to dull gray from formatting button.
- To highlight items due in next 7 days
- Add one more “use a formula…” rule
- Write =AND(MEDIAN(TODAY()+1,$C6,TODAY()+7)=$C6,$D6<>”Yes”)
- And set fill color to orange.
- To highlight items already due
- Add one more rule
- Write =AND($C6<=TODAY(),$D6<>”Yes”)
- And set fill color to red & font color to white.
- Done!
Now, the items will be highlighted based on the current date (TODAY) and change colors as you make progress.
Why does it work? – Explanation
At this point you may have 2 burning questions.
- Why does this work?
- How the heck am I supposed to ship 100 units of smile.
Lets talk about the solution & understand why it works.
Understanding the highlighting conditions
We have 3 conditions in our highlight table (shown above).
- If done show in dull gray color
- If not done & due in next 7 days show in orange color fill.
- If not done & already due show in red fill, white color
If done:
The first condition is easy to check. We just see if a todo item is completed and then highlight the whole row dull gray color. So we write =$D6=”Yes” as the condition. We use $D6 (not D6) because we want Excel to look at column D (completed?) even when we are highlighting other columns (B – Item, C – Due date).
If not done & due in next week:
This is tricky. We need to check,
If completed is not yes
AND
If due date is with in next week
So we start with an AND formula. We write =AND($D6<>”Yes”
Then to check if due date is in next week, we use MEDIAN formula, like this MEDIAN(TODAY()+1,$C6,TODAY()+7)
So the condition becomes =AND(MEDIAN(TODAY()+1,$C6,TODAY()+7)=$C6,$D6<>”Yes”)
If already due:
This is another simple AND formula =AND($C6<=TODAY(),$D6<>”Yes”)
Remember:
We need to use $D6 & $C6 (instead of D6, C6) because we want Excel to check Completed & Due date columns. By removing the $ Excel will check relative columns and the conditions would not work!
More: Using relative vs. absolute references in Excel formulas
Now that we understand how this works, give me a big smile. And repeat that 99 more times & you know how to ship 100 smiles 
Download Example File
Click here to download example file. Break it apart, play with it to understand the whole highlight if due thing.
Note: I use random formulas to generate due dates & completed values. Press F9 to get fresh set of dates. Start typing your own values to remove formulas.
How do you handle dead-lines?
Do you use conditional formatting to see which items are due? I use conditional formatting for this all the time. What techniques you use? Is your dead-line criteria very different than shown above? Please share your tips & ideas with us using comments. I would love to learn from you.
Using Conditional Formatting to deal with Due dates
Here are a few useful articles if you use Excel to track to do items & reminders.
- Conditional formatting & Dates – an introduction – Must read
- Christmas shopping list in Excel: conditional formatting to track budgets, bought items etc.
- Employee shift calendar in Excel: Using dates, shift data to show busy & dull times.
- Annual goals tracker: Track goals by % completed
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At Chandoo.org, I have one goal, "to make you awesome in excel and charting". This blog is started in 2007 and today has 450+ articles and tutorials on using excel, making better charts. 
21 Responses to “Highlight due dates in Excel – Show items due, overdue and completed in different colors”
Nice!
Been using something like this for quite a while. Most companies use deadlines so this would be usefulle for everyone.
Love it – although I often turn my books late anyway
I am still not sure how the MEDIAN function works. When I print the value, it prints a random 5 digit number, But, when used in the formula, it does equate to the date which is weird. Why does it behave such ?
=MEDIAN(TODAY()+1, $C6,TODAY()+7) in a cell returns a 5 digit # while
=AND(MEDIAN(TODAY()+1,$C6,TODAY()+7)=$C6,$D6<>”Yes”) this seems to work just fine in Conditional formatting.
The 5 digit number that you see is the number of days elapsed since 1st Jan 1900 to the date in question. Excel uses this as a basis for all numeric operations on dates.
Following what Excel Challenged mentioned above,
Change the Number format of the cell to DD MMM YY or whatever format you want.
Very clever use of Median – wouldn’t have thought of using it!
@Excel Challenged:
“The MEDIAN function, one of Excel’s statistical functions, shows you the middle number in a data list.
Middle, in this case, refers to arithmetic value rather than the location of the numbers in a list.
If there is an even set of numbers, the median is the average of the middle two values. ”
So, if we give three dates (start date, target date, end date), median will return the middle date of the three. If target date is between the start and end dates, then the median function will return this. If the target date is before the start date, then the median function will return the start date. If the target date is after the end date, then the median function will return the end date.
Can you change the dates to only fall on week days? How?
@Jocelyn
Can you please explain more about what you want to do?
We have an accounts payable spread sheet that has due dates of bills on it. I would like the dates to only fall on weekdays since we do not work weekends. Thank you for your help.
Ok, lets say if due date is 30 days plus date of invoice; then;
=IF(AND(WEEKDAY(C13+30,2)>=1,WEEKDAY(C13+30,2)<=5),C13+30,IF(WEEKDAY(C13+30,2)=6,C13+32,C13+31))
In the above; IF condition will check if weekday of due date is between 1 and 5 ie. 1 being monday and 5 being Friday.
Then if this is true then it adds 30 days to the date of invoice, else it will add 31 days if due date is falling on sunday or add 32 days from date of invoice if its Saturday…
Hope i got it right… Chandoo what do u think?
How do I have the cell highlight just every 14 days after the date I manually enter in?
I contact someone on the 1st and I want the cell to highlight on the 14th and that’s it.
brilliant – this is just what I need,
I wil be adding tasks to the spreadsheet so how can I copy the conditional formatting to other cells in the relevant columns please?
Thank you
Hi Chandoo! Very nice! Can this be done also in Google Spreadsheet? If not can you please show us a workaround or similar. Thank you.
i have a formula i need to work out. im more of a novice and enjoy working with excel, however some of the more intense formulas escape me. i have followed this thread quite a bit and believe that i can use this to solve my problem, however i cant seem to grasp the specific verbage of the formula i need. i have 2 colums, one for PT test complet, one for PT test due, i have used a simple format of (=column1+180) to get my due date, what i need is to get the due date to highlight color 1-150 days after green, 151to 180 yellow and 181 days after red. help???
Hi Larry… Thanks for your comments.
The simplest way to do this is, add an extra column (lets call it completed).
Write the formula =today()-column1
Now, use this column value to color the cells accordingly.
im not quite grasping this, can you give me an example?
when i do this, it returns the date as 1900
Good stuff! It worked well for me, however, I now wish to apply the same CF to 2 columns, instead of a cell selction. When I do this, all the blank cells in the columns turn red. Is there a formula for “if blank do not format” or similar?
No problem, I’ve worked it out…modified the last formula to read….
=AND($D1>0,$D1<=TODAY()+28,$E1<>”YES”)
The $D1>0 statement means that any blank cells are not formatted.
I’m wanting to figure out how i would do this for my job…i need to have orders signed by doctors and i’m wanting it to let me know when two weeks has passed and the order has not been received.
Hello,
I need help…..
I am trying to make an employee spread sheet that will tell me when training is expired or about to expired or completed. I have an idea but I am still having trouble with the formula, I can do it in one cell but not for an entire column. It is not that big, one column for the employee names, next columns for the dates of the trainings. if training are completed I want them to turn green, if training are 30 days before expiration i want them to turn yellow and if they are expire i want them to turn red. any help please…
thank you