Contextures Blog

The holidays are a great time to catch up on tasks. I’ve updated another popular Excel video — Colour a Row Based on a Cell Value in Excel.

To continue the conditional formatting theme, here are a few articles that you might have missed, when they were originally posted.

• Highlight Weekend Dates in Excel – To make it easier to keep track of weekends in Excel, you can use conditional formatting to highlight the rows where the date is a Saturday or Sunday.
• Excel Conditional Formatting – Data Bars – In Excel 2007 and Excel 2010, you can use conditional formatting to add data bars to cells. This makes it easy to visually compare the list of numbers, just as you would in a bar chart.
• Highlight Lottery Numbers with Conditional Formatting – If you win the big draw, you’ll be sure to notice, if you use Excel to highlight the winning numbers.

Watch the Conditional Formatting Video

Watch this short video to see how to colour a row based on a cell value in Excel.

There is a full transcript following the video.

Video Transcript:

With Excel’s conditional formatting, you can easily highlight a cell if it’s over or under a certain value, or if it meets a value that you’ve set.

But in some cases, instead of just a single cell, you might like to highlight a whole row in a table, if one of the cells in that row is over a certain number or under.

In this case, we would like to highlight each row in this list if the number of units sold is greater than 75.

So to do that, I’m going to select all of the rows, all of the columns in each row. So I’ve selected from A2 down to D10.

On the Ribbon, on the Home tab, I’ll click Conditional Formatting, and none of these preset rules will do exactly what I want. So I’m going down to New Rule, and in here I’ll select a formula.

So I’m going to use a formula to determine how to color each row.

When I click that, there’s a spot where I can put the formula.

I want to, in each row, look at the value that’s in column B. So I’ll type =

And we want, from every column, we want to look at column B. So we have to lock that cell. We don’t want it to be relative, we want it to be absolute.

So type a $ to lock that in. And then B.

And we want, in this case, the active cell we can see is white, where the other cells are highlighted with blue.

We can see that, in the name box, A2 is showing up. So that’s the active cell, so the active row is 2. So I’m going to type 2 here.

We’re going to check what’s in B2 and see if it’s greater than 75. So that’s our test.

And if it is greater than 75, we want to format it. So I’ll click Format and I’ll choose a fill color, maybe a blue color and click OK, and click OK again.

And now, any row where the number of units is greater than 75, all four cells in that row are colored blue.

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