Excel Tips
Excel Tips
Click OK.
Congratulations, you have mastered a conditional formatting trick now
Project plans / gantt charts are everyday activity in most of our lives. Creating a simple and
snazzy project plan template in excel is not a difficult job, using conditional formatting a bit of
formulas you can do it no time.
First create a table structure like shown above, with columns like Activity, start and end
day, day 1, 2,3, etc…
Now, whenever a day falls between start and end day for a corresponding activity, we
need to highlight that row. For that we need to identify whether a day falls between start
and end. We can do that with the below formulas,
=IF(AND(F$8>=$D9, F$8<=$E9),"1","")
Which means, whenever, the day number represented on the top row is
between start and end we will in 1 in the corresponding cell.
Next, whenever the cell value is 1, we will just fill the cell with a favorite color and
change the font to same color, so that we dont see anything but a highlighted cell, better
still, whenever you change the start or end dates, the color will change automatically.
This will be done by conditional formatting like below:
Incell graphing is a nifty trick that basically uses REPT() function (used to repeat a string,
character given number of times) to generate bar-charts with in a cell. You can apply conditional
formatting on top of them to give the charts a good effect. Here is a sample:
The above is a table of visits to Pointy Haried Dilbert in the month of January 2008. As you
can see I have highlighted (by changing the font color to red and making it bold) for the cells that
have more than average number of visits in the month. I am not going to tell you how to do it, it
is your home work
Often we will do highly monotonous job like typing data in a sheet. Since the work is
monotonous you tend to make mistakes, omit a few or repeat something etc. This can be avoided
by conditional formatting. I use this trick whenever I am typing something or pasting a formula
over a rather large range of cells (for eg. vlookup on annual revenue data of all your accounts,
could run in to thousands of rows across multiple states /regions etc.).
Lets see how you can highlight a cell when it has an error:
First select the cells that you want to search for errors
Next go to menu > format > conditional formatting and mention the formula as:
=iserror() (see below)
In the same way you track repetitions, a simple countif() would do the magic for you,
or Omissions (again a countif())
Thats it, you have learned how to save tons of time by letting excel do the job for you. Sit
back and sip that coffee before it gets cold.
As I said before you can use conditional formatting to create intuitive sales reports or analytics
outputs. Like the one shown here,