You can check for all kinds of things. You can also apply a multitude of different formatting options ranging from basic cell colours and font colours to coloured data bars, colour scales (heat maps) and even icon sets.

Moving past the basics you can set a condition based on a formula and that’s what we’ll be doing in this cheat sheet example.

The Conditional Formatting tool is available on the Home tab.

Example: Highlighting every ‘Category A’ row

Consider this worksheet. Every ‘Category A’ row has been highlighted automatically.

Here’s how it's done.

1. Select cells A2:D10 (the cells that you want to highlight when appropriate).
2. Select the Home tab, if necessary.
3. Click the Conditional Formatting icon.
4. Choose New Rule.


Figure 02 - Selecting New Rule

5. Choose ‘Use a formula to determine which cells to format’.
6. Write a formula. When creating a formula to be applied across a cell range, write the formula as if you were only checking the first cell. In this case, that is cell A2. The formula is
   
   A2=”A”
   
   However, you need to adapt the formula so it works correctly for every row and every column.
   
   Leave the row number untouched. Relative referencing is what you need. For each subsequent row, the formula should check the cell in column A for that row.
   
   But you must fix the column letter, because every cell in a row need to check the cell in column A. If that cell is category A, then the current cell should be formatted.
   
   So, you need to change the formula to:
   
   $A2=”A”
   
   
7. Set the formatting, e.g. set the cell colour to yellow.


Figure 03 - Write a Conditional Formatting formula

That’s it.

To test the formula, whenever the category in column A is "A" every data cell in that row is highlighted automatically.

Have you used conditional formatting in interesting ways?