Time for another round of unconditional love. Today, let’s learn about conditional formatting top tips. It is one of the most useful and powerful features in Excel. With just a few clicks of conditional formatting you can add powerful insights to your data. Ready to learn the top tips? Read on.
1. Highlight matching / missing items in two lists
Everyday millions of people ask – “Which items are common in these two lists?” and then most of them waste several minutes (or hours) comparing the lists. But you can answer the question in just five seconds. It is so simple and elegant.
- Select first list.
- Hold CTRL key and select the second list. This highlights both lists.
- Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Highlight cell rules > Duplicate values
- Voila, you can instantly see which values are common in both lists.
- Bonus tip: If you want to see which values are unique to each list, just flip the highlight rule from dialog.
Related: Compare two lists in Excel [complete guide] | Compare things in Excel – podcast
2. Highlight top 10 items
Once again, a common problem faced by lots of people everyday. Which items are top / bottom n in this list?
The answer is simple. Just select your list and apply top / bottom rules.
Let’s say you have monthly customer walk-ins at your store as a list, like below.
You want to know which are top 10 days in November for customer walk-ins.
- Highlight walk-ins column
- Go to Home > Conditional formatting > Top/bottom rules > Top 10 items..
- Click ok (or change the number if you fancy)
- Done and done.
Pro tip: The default top / bottom rules only highlight the value column. If you want to highlight entire row or the corresponding date (or other data), you can use a formula based rule, like below:
Say your data is in A1:B30 and you want to highlight the rows where value in column B is top 10.
Select your data (A1:B30), go to Conditional formatting > New Rule. Select “Use formula…” option. Type in
=$B1 >= LARGE($B1:$B30,10)and set up formatting. Click ok and top 10 items in your data will be highlighted.
3. Visualize changes over time with elegant icons
Things change, people change, money changes and most importantly, data changes… all the time. So how do you quickly and elegantly visualize how things have changed over time? Simple, apply conditional formatting icons to spot the changes.
Let’s go back to our store walk-ins example from #2. We want to see the trend like this:
To get this, in the adjacent column, write this simple formula to compare walks-ins with previous day.
Now, select “Trend” column and go to Conditional formatting > New rule
Select format style as “Icon sets” and apply the rule as shown below.
Bingo, your cute trend icons are ready.
Related pro tip: Don’t just show simple numbers in your reports and dashboards | Web analytics dashboard with conditional formatting & sparklines
4. Top customers by category
Time to ramp up the game. Let’s say you run a sporting goods store and you are looking the category-wise units sold to each customer, like below.
Your question: Which customers are top in each category?
Unfortunately, we can’t use default top / bottom rules to answer this question. But we can use a tidy little formula to get the answer. Let’s say our data is in the range $R$6:$T$124.
- Select your data, go to Conditional Formatting > New Rule
- Select “Use a formula…” type of rule
- Write the rule
=$T6 = MAX(IF($R$6:$R$124 = $R6, $T$6:$T$124)) - Set up formatting as you want
- Done.
Check out below illustration to understand how this rule works:
And the result is awesome:
Related: MAXIF formula explained
5. Highlight values in a range
Often we want to narrow our focus to a small range so we can analyze better. Let’s go back to the store walk-ins example. If you want to highlight all days when the walk-ins are between 145 to 160 (the sweet spot as your manager calls it), you can use the built-in between rule, like below:
- Select walk-ins column
- Go to Conditional Formatting > Highlight cell rules > Between…
- Either type in the range or point to cells containing values.
- Done.
Related: BETWEEN formula in Excel
Top 5 conditional formatting tips – Example workbook
Click here to download the workbook with all these tips and sample data. Play with it to learn more. Try to implement your own rules to understand CF better.
What are your top conditional formatting tips?
Over to you. What are your top conditional formatting tips? Please share them in the comments section.
More conditional formatting tips:
Conditional formatting is one of my favorite Excel features. I talk about it all the time. Check out below tutorials for more awesome tips.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.