Asked By
Corey Joel
0 points
N/A
Posted on - 11/28/2014
What is conditional formatting in Excel? What is this feature used for? Where in the menu can I find the option to set up Conditional Formatting. I would like to highlight alternate rows in a worksheet. Can I do this with the help of conditional formatting? What is the formula I need to set for this?
I need some help to understand conditional formatting.
Hello Corey,
Conditional Formatting is a method by which we can set any format on a cell or a group of cell and that format will be changed only based on some value changes on those cells or some formula changes on those cells. As an example we can set a cell to be appear bold only when the value of that cell is greater than 700.
The use of conditional formatting is very important in case of marking cell or particular portion of excel sheet that contains some specific data value or that belongs to a range of specific data values. When we try to find out some records from bulk data those are based on some criteria we use conditional formatting. Suppose in a column we want to mark those cells which contains text “Hello”, then we need to set conditional formatting on that specified column based on condition—cell text value=”Hello”. Whenever value “Hello” appears on any cell of that column it will marked as particular colour or arrow as per setup.
In Excel 2013 under Home tab on action pane there is a link Conditional formatting, if we click conditional formatting we will see a drop down with options, those are basically conditions based on which formatting can be done on a particular cell or group of cells. In previous version of excel (2007, 2010) there is a tab called format in action pane. Under that tab all formatting conditions setup can be found.
Alternate rows can be highlighted in a worksheet. First press CTRL button and hold CTRL button, then click alternate rows that need to be highlighted. After selection of rows click conditional formatting and select highlight cells rules and then select equal to. After selecting equal to one small screen will appear where 0(zero) need to be put as value and select the marker from drop down which is just beside the value field, as an example Red border. Click Ok and it will be seen that the alternate rows selected for formatting are highlighted with the marker selected. 
Regards,
Derick Harris
