FIVE BENEFITS OF CONDITIONAL FORMATTING

Conditional formatting, as the name suggests, is formatting cells with respect to certain conditions. Possible conditions might involve duplicates, specific numerical or textual values, imposed rules, identified patterns, or any other limiting criteria. When the condition is fulfilled by a cell in the specified range, the cell is highlighted with a different format, like changing color or font, to make the cell identifiable. The formatting can be done by changing the cell color, border, or font.

Five Benefits of Conditional Formatting

Here are five benefits of using Conditional formatting

• Heat Maps for huge data

  Using conditional formatting, you can make heat maps, which provide color scales to numbers within a specified range. Providing color scales makes it easier to understand the data without actually knowing the numbers. Heat maps make analyzing data easier and faster. 

  
  

• Icon Sets for Numbers

  Conditional formatting makes data easier to analyze. Another way to make it easier to understand the data is to use icon sets of conditional formatting. These are used to analyze the changes. For example, if a number increases, it is depicted with an upward arrow, decreases with a downward arrow, and no change with a neutral sign. Using such signs makes it easier to understand the pattern of the data. 

  
  

• Data Bars for Numbers 

  Just like color scales and icon sets, data bars in Excel can also be used. Data bars help determine the magnitude of a number. Let us suppose we have four numbers: 20, 40, 1, and 100. When data bars are applied to these numbers, each cell will have a colored data bar, with 100 having the highest bar, 1 having the lowest, and 20/40 having mid- to small-sized bars. 

  
  

• Identification of specific values

  Conditional formatting helps you identify where in the selected cells lies the specific value that you are looking for. The value can be a number, text, formula-driven result, duplicates, etc. By applying the condition, you can easily identify the cells having the specific values that you need. You can set different formats to highlight the results, such as changing cell or font color, changing font size, changing cell borders, etc. 

  
  

• Formatting Dates

  Formatting numbers and texts can be easy even without conditional formatting, but Dates can be tough to analyze. Conditional formatting also helps format dates. Conditions like past week/month/year can be set to highlight the corresponding data. It makes understanding data with dates easier and timesaving. 

We are aware of the validity of data analysis. Conditional formatting is an appropriate function of Excel that makes it easy to find, sort and analyze the data. Try using conditional formatting in Excel and let us know how it helped you with your data.