What is conditional formatting?

Abstract

you might think of conditional formatting as automatic formatting that is triggered by conditions that you define.

Conditional formatting is a great way to visually highlight important information in a worksheet.

Let’s take a look.

A common use case of conditional formatting is to highlight values in a set of data.

Here we have a table that shows monthly sales figures for a group of sales people.

Conditional formatting is applied with rules.

First, opt for cells you’d like to format.

In our sales table, that’s all the monthly sales figures, excluding totals.

There are many conditional format presets in this menu.

For this example, we’ll use a preset in the Highlight Cells Rules section.

Because our threshold is $5000, we’ll use 5000 for the condition.

For the format, we can choose from several pre-built options, or we can define a custom format.

For now, let’s choose the “Light Red Fill with Dark Red Text” preset.

Conditional formatting is fully automatic.