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.
23 Responses to “Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA”
Its possible to display up to 4 text values.
Have a look at the screen shot of an example that I had posted way back at the EHA and figure out how its done !
http://tinypic.com/r/muzywk/6
With Excel 2010 you can use Conditional Formatting to apply custom number formats which can display text. (In older versions you can only modify text color and cell background color, but not number formats.) Using CF allows for an even larger number of different display values.
[...] Display text values in Pivot Tables without VBA [...]
Hey,
Thanks, this helps. But how do you do it for multiple values where there is a huge amount of non repeating text?
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn't a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
@Soumya
The only way to do more than 4 values is to make the Pivot Table manually with formulas, of course then it isn’t a Pivot table
You can of course do it with VBA
You may want to have a look at this description of how to do it here: http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2011/06/emulate-excel-pivot-tables-with-texts-in-the-value-area-using-vba.html
[...] Pivot Tables take tables of data and allow the user to summarise and consolidate the data at the same time. This is a great and very fast method of analysis but is restricted to handling mathematical functions on the value field resulting in numerical summaries. – read more [...]
[…] Read more here: Displaying Text Values in Pivot Tables without VBA […]
There is a very good way actually for handling text inside values area.
First you create a special column on the very left side and call it ID, and put unique ID (numbers only), and then create a pivot table with:
Row Labels and Column labels as you like, and in the Values labels use the unique ID number.
Move the unique ID number (copy paste) somewhere to the right and use vlookup to load the data you need using the ID as reference.
It is a bit longer way but for me it works perfectly to combine values as you like in any moment.
hope helps.
Regards,
Jon
Thank you! I finally understand pivot tables thanks to your clear, concise explanations and examples.
Good Day. This is exactly what i have been looking for. However when i try it on my pivot table or even when i try to recreate this exercise using the sample worksheet, i get this error:
"Microsoft Excel cannot use the number format you typed. Try using one of the built-in number formats."
Same thing here, Excel quite did not like the format in my PowerPivot. Any clues as to what may be going on? Thanks.
I have the same thing happening on my end. I'm running a normal pivot table on a .xlsm file.
@Danzi
What format did you use?
can you post the file ?
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C
MR.A CFVDE2458T
MR.Z AAVCR12548C
MR.X AAAAC1254T
MR.Z AADCD245T
pls. help in table there is name, pan. amount. i have to make pivot table for example
NAME PAN AMOUNT
MR.X AAAAC1254T 500.00
MR.Y AAABR1258C 1000
MR.A CFVDE2458T 2000
MR.Z AAVCR12548C 5451
MR.X AAAAC1254T 45564
MR.Z AADCD245T 4500
how to get pivot tabe so i get PAN no. against Name.
I found an easy way to get text values in pivot table.
I create an other worksheet in wich each cell has a formula that copy the pivot table. The trick is that the formula does a lookup for the numbers in the pivot table.
The formula looks like that:
=IF(ISNUMBER(table!A1);VLOOKUP(table!A1;Code!$A$1:$B$65;2);IF(ISBLANK(table!A1);" ";table!A1))
Code is a worksheet where there is a liste of text /numbers correspondance.
As a bonus The new sheet is easier to format
Additional trick:
In my case, i encoded differents codeid with a power(2, codeId-1) so that summing then is equivalent to concatenate them.
1-A
2-B
4-C
8-D
yields :
5 - AC
14 - BCD
Hi
I want to ask if pivot can display dates in pivot field. As in a column i have customers and in row different items i want to know there last purchase date. anyone help in this??
Hello Guys, Need your help
I am doing some analysis of the cycle time of the product i.e how much time a product takes from manufacturing to the central warehouse.
I have batch numbers for the product and against them i have to pull out the diff. dates
Like the base date is from where the manufacturing start. So i have the batch number,against it's manuf. date. Now i have to pull out the date when it was quality released.
I have the quality released data but the data have duplicates, like i will have two dates or may be three for the same batch. So my main objective is to pull out the date which is latest among them.
BATCH NO. DATE of Mfg. DATE of Quality release
A1 12/4/2014 (HERE I HAVE TO PULL value)
Next Sheet
BATCH NO. DATE of Quality Release
A1 14/5/2014
a2 23/5/2016
A1 12/5/2014
A1 13/6/2014
From this sheet i have to pull up the latest date format of date here is dd/mm/yyy
TIA
[…] needed to present text instead of counts in a pivot table value column. Here is an excellent resource for Excel manipulation, in addition to an overview of pivot […]
This is great thank you.
Wow!!! Excellent!! It helped me a lot.
I am developing training tracking sheet for 200 employees with training completed date. Each employee will be attending 25 courses. How to indicate actual dates in pivot table value field.