Today is the first anniversary of Excel Conditional Formatting post (Don’t worry, I am not going to make anniversary posts for all the 150 odd excel articles here). This is the most popular post on PHD. The post has 100 comments and bookmarked on delicious more than 700 times. It is truly a rock star post on PHD.
To celebrate the 1 year of teaching conditional formatting to you all, we have a series of posts, the first of which is “What is excel conditional formatting & How to use it?”
What is excel conditional formatting ?
Conditional formatting is your way of telling excel to format all the cells that meet a criteria in a certain way. For eg. you can use conditional formatting to change the font color of all cells with negative values or change background color of cells with duplicate values.
Why use conditional formatting?
Of course, you can manually change the formats of cells that meet a criteria. But this a cumbersome and repetitive process. Especially if you have large set of values or your values change often. That is why we use conditional formatting. To automatically change formatting when a cell meets certain criteria.
Few Examples of Conditional Formatting
Here are 3 examples of conditional formatting.
So How do I Apply Conditional Formatting?
This is very simple. First select the cells you want to format conditionally. Click on menu > format > conditional formatting or the big conditional formatting button in Excel 2007.
(we have used excel 2003 in this tutorial, but conditional formatting is similar in excel 2007 with lots of additional features)
You will see a dialog like this:
There are 2 types of conditions:
- Cell value based conditions: These conditions are tested on the cell value itself. So if you select a bunch of cells, and mention the condition as between 15 and 25, all the cells with values between 15 and 25 are formatted as you specify.
- Formula based conditions: Sometimes you need more flexibility than a few simple conditions. That is when formulas come handy. Conditional Formatting Formulas are slightly complicated and can be difficult to learn or use if you are new to excel. But they are very useful and intuitive and if you use them once you get a hang of it.
What are the limitations of Conditional Formatting?
In earlier versions of Excel you can only define max. of 3 conditions. This is no longer true if you are using Excel 2007 (read our review of excel 2007)
However, you can overcome the conditional formatting limitation using VBA macros (again, if you are new to excel, you may want to wait few weeks before plunging in to VBA)
Also, you can only use conditional formatting with cells and not with other objects like charts.
Ok, Enough Theory, Time for your First Conditional Formatting
Go ahead, open a new workbook and try few conditional formats yourself. See how easy and intuitive it is. Use it in your day to day work and impress your colleagues. Learn 5 impressive tricks about conditional formatting.
If you have trouble getting started, download the conditional formatting examples workbook.
Tell us how YOU use Conditional Formatting
Share with us how you use CF in your work. I am sucker for conditional formatting and use it wherever I can. What about you?
This post is part of our Spreadcheats series, a 30 day online excel training program for office goers and spreadsheet users. Join today.
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA