Excel Conditional Formatting Step by Step

Welcome to maina.in, This Post is about using the Conditional Formatting in Excel and here I tried to explain you step by step process of Excel Conditional Formatting.

Conditional Formatting is nothing but adding specific predefined formulas to the Excel Cells, So that it will auto change the Background Colors of the Excel Cell based on the assigned formula.

Conditional Formatting automatically highlights the data in a spreadsheet as per the assigned formulas.

Default Excel Conditional formatting helps a lot in normal day to day business activity. Anyway now and then the default Excel Conditional formatting don't go far enough. Adding your own particular equation/formulas to a existing Excel Conditional formatting provides for it a force support to help you do things the implicit principles can't do.

In the below example, I have shown you how the conditional formatting works and How the Background cell colors highlights when the Data reached the assigned conditional formatting value.

In the below picture the Values in Monthly Spending when crossed/exceeded the assigned Monthly Budget limit, the Background color of the cell was highlighted with Color Red.

Similarly if the Cell value is less than the Monthly budget threshold the background of Cell is changed to Green, if it is equal to the Threshold Monthly budget limit, the color is yellow.

Below Steps shows you how to add the conditional formatting.

1) To add the conditional formatting to a cell, Select the Excel Cell and go to Format -> Conditional Formatting. 

Below screenshots shows you how to add the Excel Conditional Formatting. 

In the Below screen, I have added the conditions how the Cell color should be changed when the Value is less than the threshold, greater than or equal to the Threshold Value.

to add color, click Format and Pattern and select the colors.

In Conditional Formatting there are two options 1) Cell Value is 2) Formula is

If the Cell Value is option is not helpful, Use Formula is option to add your own formulas for Excel Conditional Formatting.

Conditional Formatting will be very much useful in Business activities, as well as for Home Work in remembering Birth Days, Budgets etc.

In Business Activities for example if you are doing system performance report, if you add the conditional formatting, the cell will be highlighted automatically as per the assigned Formula, if the data of the Cell reached the Formula settings.

In a simple example, if you set the Threshold limit of File System usage as 95 %, and you have entered the value of the Current File System as 95.2%, as the Value exceeded the assigned Threshold limit as per conditional formatting, cell will be highlighted with the Red Color, so that you can proactively increase the File System Size before it completely occupies and System bottle neck occurs.

Hope this explains you how to use the Conditional Formatting in Excel, Please drop a comment if you require anything, Thanks for Visiting and Spending Time reading the Blog post.