we've already looked at ways that you
can visualize your data using charts and
sparklines conditional formatting offers
a different way of visualizing data
because it allows you to apply rules to
the cells that will add formatting such
as color coding based on the cells value
in this example we have sales statistics
for a number of different salespeople
and let's say that the sales goal for
each person is $5,000 per month we can
use conditional formatting to see who
met or exceeded this goal first select
the data
and then go to the conditional
formatting command on the Home tab
and then click highlight cells rules and
select greater than
we want to format cells that are greater
than 5000 so we'll type that here
and then just choose a formatting option
I'll choose green fill with dark green
text
so it really makes those cells stand out
you can see that not many salespeople
met the goal in June or August but
September and October were much better
now let's look at some of the
conditional formatting presets I'm going
to reselect these cells
go back to conditional formatting
there are three different types of
presets data bars which are kind of like
a bar graph
color scales which change the background
color based on the value
and icon sets which put different icons
in the cells depending on their value I
think this one is especially easy to
read
the icons help us to see which items are
the highest and the lowest and which
ones are about average you might also
notice that the first rule we created is
still visible and that's because Excel
lets you have multiple conditional
formatting rules at the same time to
clear all of the rules just select the
cells
then go to conditional formatting clear
rules and you'll have a few different
options but I'd like to just remove the
greater than 5000 rule while keeping the
icons to do this go to manage rules
you'll see a list of all of the rules
that you've applied and you can just
select one of them and click delete rule
so practice using the different types of
conditional formatting and try combining
different ones to see what they tell you
about your data like what you just saw
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