Conditional Formatting and the Status bar in Excel
Happy Tuesday everybody,
This week, we have the third installment of our Microsoft Office shortcuts.These quick commands will save you a lot of time and make you much more efficient.In our poll on the right sidebar, you indicated that Microsoft Excel was the trickiest of the Office programs, so this week’s post will revolve around it.
First off, have you ever had a huge list of numbers and wanted to know if there were any duplicates?Or how about only wanting to see numbers that were greater than or less than a certain number?
Conditional Formatting
In the Styles section at the upper right hand side of the screen, there is a drop-down menu called Conditional Formatting.This will allow you to add formatting (cell fills or different font colors) to cells depending on their values.So, for example, you can choose a list of numbers and highlight only the ones that are below the average or in the top 10 percent.To do this,
1.Highlight the cells that you want to analyze.
2.Click the Conditional formatting button in the upper right hand corner of the screen.
3.Choose the parameters for your data set.For example, if you want to choose cells where the values are above the average, choose the appropriate option.
4.Choose the type of formatting that you want Excel to apply.For example, it can fill the cells where the values are above the average with a red background and a darker red font.
5.Click OK.
Now, the cells that follow the parameters will have the formatting that you chose, allowing you to see the results more easily.There are many conditions to choose from.You can choose cells that are a certain sequence of letters, if there are dates you can sort them by date, you can find duplicate values, you can even create your own parameters by clicking New Rule.
One smaller tip:
The Status Bar (in Excel)
Did you know that if you have multiple cells selected in Excel, there is a status bar at the bottom of the page that will give you basic facts about that data set?Whenever multiple cells are selected, at the bottom right of the page will be three facts about that set: the quantity, or count, of the values, the average of the values, and the sum of the values.This way you don’t have to waste time creating the more basic formulas, you can just see these stats at the bottom of the page.
That’s all for now.Until next week,
The elite Program
Follow
Comments are closed.