Highlight due dates in Excel – Show items due, overdue and completed in different colors

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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 overdue items in Excel?

The item can be an invoice, a to do activity, a project or anything. Here is an example of overdue, upcoming activities highlighted.

Highlight overdue items in Excel - Show items due, overdue and completed in different colors
highlight-overdue-items-in-excel

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.

sample data for highlighting overdue items
sample-data-overdue-items

And your problem is,

  • Highlight items & due dates, subject to these conditions

    Criteria for highlighting - highlight if due
  • 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)
sample-data-overdue-items

How to apply conditional formatting rules

We need to apply 3 rules. Follow below steps:

Highlight overdue items:

Conditional formatting rule for highlighting overdue items
conditional-formatting-rule-for-overdue-items
  1. Select the entire range (B6:D15) and from home ribbon select conditional formatting
  2. Click on New rule
  3. Select the rule type as “use a formula…”
  4. Write =AND($C6<=TODAY(),$D6<>”Yes”)
  5. And set fill color to red & font color to white.

Highlight upcoming items:

Rule for upcoming activities or items in green color
conditional-formatting-rule-for-upcoming-tasks
  1. Add one more “use a formula…” rule
  2. Write =AND(MEDIAN(TODAY()+1,$C6,TODAY()+7)=$C6,$D6<>”Yes”)
  3. And set fill color to green.

Completed items rule:

Highlighting completed items in a different color - highlight if due
  1. Add another “use a formula…” rule
  2. Now write =$D6=”Yes”
  3. And set font color to dull gray from formatting button.

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.

  1. Why does this work?
  2. 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
  • Not done & due in next 7 days show in orange color fill.
  • If not done & already due show in red fill, white color

Rule for completed items:

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”)

conditional-formatting-rule-for-upcoming-tasks

If already due:

This is another simple AND formula =AND($C6<=TODAY(),$D6<>”Yes”)

conditional-formatting-rule-for-overdue-items

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 🙂

Highlight overdue items – Video

If you are still confused about the conditional formatting rules for highlighting overdue items, check out this video. Watch it below or see it on my YouTube channel.

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 & Dates – More Examples

Here are a few useful articles if you use Excel to track to do items & reminders.

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26 Responses to “FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets [Roundup]”

  1. J. J. says:

    Nice roundup! Do you know of any one-page spreadsheets which will be updated by an administrator after each game? Would be nice to be able to print out the latest results whenever I feel like checking them as I probably won't be following closely every day.

    I actually haven't tried any of the above ones yet, but I thought I'd mention this one that I found which makes a nice one-page form you can fill in dynamically. http://exceltemplate.net/sports/world-cup-2010-schedule-and-scoresheet/

  2. Diego Garcia says:

    I would like to recommend you these one: http://www.anotagol.com/
    You can choose your interface language (english, spanish, italian, portuguese, german or french) and your country for the timezone of match. I like it very much.

  3. [...] Passend zu gerade laufenden Fußball-WM gibt es auf Chandoo.org alles wissenswerte über Excel-Anwendungen für den Fußball-Fan. [...]

  4. Rohit1409 says:

    Great!!!

    I strongly recommend this :

    http://www.en.excel-soccer-2010.de/downloads

    Chandoo how you found this ...

  5. Chandoo says:

    @Rohit.. really beautiful file. I missed it during my research. Now, I recommend it. 🙂

  6. Mourad Louha says:

    Hi Chandoo - thanks for the recommandation 🙂 - Regards

  7. [...] Excel, then print it on the other side of your Match Schedule from step 2 above. There are several other Excel spreadsheet templates you can download, but this is probably the only one-page version you can find; plus, it [...]

  8. Robert says:

    Does anybody know how to re-create this(?): http://www.marca.com/deporte/futbol/mundial/sudafrica-2010/calendario-english.html
    ...or do you know where a template can be found? I am DYING to have something like this on my site. When I found it, I had been looking for the longest time for a circular calendar. I found a couple that weren't adequate. Then I stumbled upon this one and my eyes nearly popped out of my head. If anyone can lead me in the right direction, I would be eternally grateful!

    Thanks in advance!
    Robert

  9. Chandoo says:

    @Robert...

    Doing something like that is a lot of work. You can probably get it done with some hired help from a flash developer.

  10. Pedro Wave says:

    @Robert, the World Cup flash in the Spanish Marca newspaper is impresive, but not much as my own animated spreadsheet with the Goals of 2010 World Cup South Africa in Excel that I just published into my blog:
    http://pedrowave.blogspot.com/2010/06/goals-of-2010-world-cup-south-africa-in.html

    Download from here:
    http://cid-6b219f16da7128e3.office.live.com/view.aspx/.Public/Goals%20South%20Africa%20Animated.xlsx

    And start to enter the goals of the rest of matches.

  11. Neil says:

    Has anyone seen, or made, a Spreadsheet where you can record the scorers and see a 'top scorers' chart. Would be a nice enhancement

  12. Chandoo says:

    @Neil... checkout this one http://www.inflexionary.com/sports/world-cup-2010-excel

    it uses macros to fetch scores from web (and provides very comprehensive analysis too)

    @All.. Thanks for the comments. I have updated the post with few more links now.

  13. Sergio Mathias says:

    Hi,
    Check this dashboards too:
    http://dashboards.org/world-cup-dashboards-and-visualizations/
    😉

  14. [...] Here is a collection of FIFA World Cup Spreadsheets if you are more in to that sort of thing. | [...]

  15. [...] Cup fever is here!In FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets Roundup, Chandoo has some links to useful World Cup tracking workbooks. Only one of them (the first one) [...]

  16. [...] World Cup fever is here!In FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets Roundup, Chandoo has some links to useful World Cup tracking workbooks. Only one of them (the first one) [...]

  17. Hey, you missed ours! It has everything you need and more, but not a whole pile of silly extras (National Anthems, etc).  I'll be making another one for the 2014 world cup.  We had over 4000 hits on it!

  18. Neil says:

    @Michael Harwood.

    Where is it then? You should have posted a link  

  19. phillip says:

    Sie sollten an einem Wettbewerb teil zu nehmen für einen der besten Blogs im Web. Ich werde empfehlen Sie diese Seite!
    Google translation: You should take part in a contest for one of the best blogs on the web. I will recommend this site!

  20. [...] and welcome to the forum, Maybe these similar spreadsheets might give you a few initial ideas: FIFA Worldcup Excel Spreadsheets [Roundup] | Chandoo.org - Learn Microsoft Excel Online If you have specific areas / formulae / layout choices for parts of your spreadsheet that you are [...]

  21. Petros says:

    Calling all football fans around the globe! The biggest football festival will kick off on the 12th June 2014 and everyone is placing their bets of who will have the honour of lifting the golden trophy.

    Use our free interactive Excel templatel to predict the World cup finalists ! No macros !

    http://www.spreadsheet1.com/world-cup-2014-free-excel-prediction-template.html

  22. marten says:

    I also made a Worldcup-tracker, with MS Access, which can also generate reports in Excel
    e.g. a match-schedule with locations on y-axis and dates on x-axis, see:
    http://worktimesheet2014.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/excel-with-match-schedule-for-2014-fifa.html
    and:
    http://worktimesheet2014.blogspot.com.es/2014/05/match-access-app-to-track-world-cup.html

  23. Vivek Ranjan says:

    where can i find raw data in excel file format of fifa world cups (1930-2014)

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