How to check line length with conditional formatting

Have you ever had to check to double-check certain lines of text aren’t too long?

One approach I like is to use conditional formatting with simple functions.

Let’s take a look.

Here’s a list of over 300 Latin titles I generated on the Lorem ipsum website.

Let’s say we need to check each title to check that it’s not more than 70 characters.

To start off, let’s use the Excel function called LEN to calculate the length of each title.

Now we can use a data filter to show only values with a length greater than 70.

But let’s look at another way to flag titles, this time with conditional formatting.

First, we’ll un-filter the list, and select all data rows in the table.

To do this, we need to use a formula to trigger the rule.

The formula is simple, just “= D5 > 70”.

We do this by adding a dollar sign before the “D”.

For the format, let’s just use an orange fill.

Back in our table, the rows that are too long are highlighted.

Let’s add one more refinement to our model.

First let’s name the input cell max_length, and give it an orange fill.