Conditional formatting in Excel® 2010

When you have a large amount of data in Excel and you want to check if figures that are incorrect, conditional formatting helps you. Conditional formatting changes the format of the selected cells when it satisfies or doesn’t satisfy the condition. Lets us see how we can use the conditional formatting option in Excel 2010.

When you are looking at scores of students, wouldn’t you like it if the cells of the students who do not qualify could be automatically highlighted? Conditional formatting helps you do just that. It will change the color of specific cells if you set the conditions right.

To use conditional formatting, you have to select a cell or a range of cells and select the option ‘conditional formatting’ which is present in the home tab in the ribbon.

• After you click the conditional formatting option, a drop down menu would appear on your screen
• Select ‘New rules’ option from the drop down menu
• A window for the formatting rule would appear on your screen
• You can choose your conditions to change the formatting of the selection of cells.

You can change the formatting based on the value of the cells which have the range of values. This option will not let you choose the values for which you want to change the formatting, but it will format the cells based on the high value and the least value in the range.

You can also use this option to change the formatting of cells which have numbers between your chosen values. You can choose your minimum and maximum values and if the number falls within that range, the formatting of the corresponding cells is changed automatically. Conditional formatting can also be used to display the duplicates in the selected range, or you can use it just for the unique values if your table has more number of duplicate values.

Use conditional formatting to find the data easily without spending excessive time by doing it manually.