BizAnalyst Network: MS Excel Tips and Tricks: Conditional Formatting

Monday, June 04, 2007

MS Excel Tips and Tricks: Conditional Formatting

Would you like to be able to scan your company’s financial operations spreadsheet and instantly see which departments are over budget or behind schedule or which accounts receivable are past due? There’s an easy way to do that in Excel, which can automatically flag cells that meet most any condition you establish. You can set the cells to display different formatting flags—colors, font styles, shading, patterns, underlining—with each custom format identifying a specific financial condition. For example, you can program Excel to flag costs that are over budget by displaying them as red; under-budget costs may appear blue.

The Excel function that does this job is conditional formatting. What makes the function especially handy is that it’s not static—that is, when the data in the worksheet change, the cells instantly reflect that by taking on the appropriate formatting.

full article on Conditional Formating in MS-Excel

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