February 18, 2002

Have Excel format it for you

Excel has a really helpful feature that many people either don't know how to use or aren't even aware it exists. It's called conditional formatting, and it allows you to tell Excel to format cells containing specific value ranges different from others.

This is very useful if say you're trying to look at monthly sales figures for a variety of items. You could tell Excel to shade any cell which has an increase of over 30% in yellow. This way, your attention will immediately be brought towards those items.

To use this handy feature do the following:

1. Highlight the area where those figures will be located,
2. Go to the Format menu and select Conditional Formatting,
3. In the dialog box that appears, fill-in the condition(s) those figures must meet in order to be formatted differently,
4. Click the Format option and set how you would like those cells formatted if the condition(s) are met.

Good luck & see you next week!

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