Conditional Formatting in Excel - Report Making

Conditional formatting is a highly effective way to highlight important information and trends in the data. Using conditional formatting, you can highlight cells in certain colours and shades depending on the cell's value.  

In this segment, you will learn to use conditional formatting to design highly readable and beautiful reports. 

Take a look at the following set of numbers. How many numbers greater than 90 are present in this table?

If you were to actually count that, apart from taking a lot of time, the task will probably bore and / or irritate you. Now take a look at the following formatted table and count the number of cells above 90.

This will probably take you less than 5-7 seconds. Apart from simple use cases like this, conditional formatting is heavily used to highlight trends in numbers, highlighting dates of the current week in specific colours etc. 

You saw that to apply multiple conditional formattings on the same data, you have to go to manage rules and then add a rule rather than creating a new rule (which will ovverride the original one). You can create gradients, use multiple colors (2-scale, 3-scale etc.) and use conditions based on numeric values, text and so on.  

You may have noted that conditional formatting fulfils the same dual purpose as most other formatting techniques - improve readability and reduce the amount of time required to understand important information. This is obviously a correct thing to do (because the inverse makes no sense, right?)

While using conditional formatting, you will have to choose between colours, formatting rules etc. Remember that anything which fulfils the above two requirements is a good formatting technique. This principle can be generalised to other formatting techniques.

Next, you will learn a few more tips and tricks of conditional formatting. Towards the end, we will also hear from Anand about how Conditional Formatting has helped him uncover insights from data.

In the next segment, you will learn some advanced formatting techniques like borders, wrap text, types of alignments etc.