Specifying conditional formatting

You can specify conditions which determine how cell content is displayed when those conditions are met. A condition may depend on the value in the cell, or on the product of a formula in another cell. You can use conditional formatting to apply a cell format or a style to a cell.

You can create unlimited conditions for a single cell. These can be a mix of value and formula conditions. You can specify that the first valid condition is applied or that all valid conditions are merged.

To create a conditional format, right-click the cell in which to create the condition and select Conditional Formatting. In the Conditional Formatting dialog, you can then assign a predefined format (for example Currency) to a condition, or specify a format.

Conditions are listed in the Conditional Formatting dialog and are applied from the top down.

Example

The first condition applies a red background to cells containing values less than 1500. The second underlines values between 500 and 1000. But, because of the order in which the conditions are applied, values between 500 and 1000 will always appear on a red background. Reversing the order of the conditions corrects this.

In this example, you could merge valid conditions instead of reversing their order. In this case, values which met both conditions would be red and underlined.