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4 Essential Conditional Formatting Tips to Make Your Data Pop

msexcel's avatar
msexcel
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Apr 20, 2023

Did you know these conditional formatting tips? In this article, you'll discover methods for highlighting patterns in your data, emphasizing insights or trends with the use of colors, icons or formulas. These 4 tips cover common scenarios at home or in small businesses, like managing expenses, home renovation and more.

Highlight the highest expenses in scenarios like personal budgeting

Create icons based on data values in scenarios like product ratings

Highlight rows using formulas in scenarios like home renovation

 

Getting Started

You can use this template on Excel for the Web, Mac Excel or Windows Excel. To get started, click on the template.

  1. Go to File › Save As › Download a Copy.
  2. Go to OneDrive
  3. Select Upload › Files
  4. Select the Excel file you downloaded in step 1.
  5. Once the upload is complete, you can open the file to use it.

 

Sharing your file with family for free

You can easily collaborate with family and friends using the Share button within Excel on the top right corner of the app. Learn more about sharing here.

 

Share

 

More Personal Templates and Examples

If you liked this, check out more templates for your personal life like Retirement and FIRE Estimators.

Retirement and FIRE Estimators

 

Also see Mr. Excel, BillJelen’s, post on Unusual Uses of Excel to learn examples of ways people are using Excel to do more in their lives.

Unusual Uses of Excel

 

Comments and Suggestions

Liked the template and want more like this? Or have comments and suggestions? You can leave comments below this blog post.

Or in Excel, go to Help>Feedback. Choose an option from the menu. Copy and paste this “#highlight" as you type a response. 

Happy Highlighting!

Updated Jul 24, 2023
Version 6.0
  • Kamanchaka this is great! Loved hearing about your innovative use of conditional formatting in architectural drawings. I love the humble but useful row height feature as well.

  • Kamanchaka's avatar
    Kamanchaka
    Copper Contributor

    I used Excel several times to create architectural drawings:

    1. Set column width equal to row height, 1 = 1cm or 1mm or whatever your base unit will be

    2. Choose your column for the y-axis and a row for the x-axis

    3. Define where you want to put your origin (mostly inner left corner of your drawing)

    4. Create a formula based on the row number for x and column number for y, I mostly use ex. 20 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30 1 2 3, make sure to also put the y scale on the first row

    5. Use conditional formatting to draw helper lines, like every 10 for example, both horizontally and vertically

    6. Use freeze window to freeze the labels of both axes

     

    Now you are ready to start! Use cell border and cell fill color to draw.

    Tip: if you don't want to calculate your new position use column() - column(ref cell) and you will now if you need to move more to the left or right.

     

    Happy home renovation!

     

     

     

  • Hi JonPeltier thanks so much for the suggestions! We updated the conditional formatting chart instructions in the template and in the blog post above to use the solid blue color bars.

  • I would recommend using solid color bars, not the gradient bars, because the gradients somewhat distort the appearance of the values.