How To Use Conditional Formatting In Excel

Hi, my name is Ghamza Jacobs and I am an IT trainer with New Horizons in London. I am here today just to show you a couple of cool little tips and tricks on Windows 7 and Office 2010. How to create conditional formatting in Microsoft excel 2010.

Conditional format is a very nice feature in Excel that can help you easily read and see the bottom line with a new data. Conditional formatting in the earlier versions used to be slightly painful. You used to have to go, if a sell is more than fifty, make it red.

If it is more than this, make it green; if it is less than this, make it yellow. These days, Microsoft has simplified everything. By using the built in conditional formatting, we can then really get very nice looking conditional format.

Let us say, I have got a total list of quantity over here. Now, I want to see what the labels of my quantity are. So what I am going to do is select the data real quick.

I select all the cells that contain all the quantities here. I then go into under the home tab. Remember, for this, you need the 2007 and 2010 conditional formatting.

Now, if I go to data bar, this is a very nice one for stock labels. As I master over it, look what happens to my data set. I am going to select the solid fill, you get gradient fill as well.

2010 does have a couple more options, 2007 pretty much just has solid fills. 2010, they have this nice looking gradient fill. So I am going to hit that one.

There I can see, just by looking at the bar what my labels are doing and what is low and high in stock. Another nice one, and something that is extremely popular with business intelligence, BI, is the new buzz word in IT. If I select the unit price, let us say I want to use traffic lights on it.

I go to icon sets. I can easily select the traffic light set there. By the way, look you have got writings over here.

Some of these are once again the star and flags, also unique to 2010. But I am going to go for the traffic lights very quickly, as in traffic lights indicating what is high and low values over there. One of the nice things about the new built in conditional formats is it automatically analyzes the lowest and highest values and arranges them all accordingly.

So remember, select your data, drop down your conditional formatting, choose your data bar, icon set or even Cali scale and you have easily created conditional formats in Excel. That was how to create conditional formats in 2010. .