If you’re looking for a way to highlight information in your Google Sheets document, conditional formatting is an excellent option. Conditional formatting allows you to change the format of cells based on certain criteria, such as dates or numerical values. For example, you can use conditional formatting to highlight any data that doesn’t fall within a particular range in yellow or red—these colors will help draw attention to this data so it doesn’t get overlooked!
On the View menu, click Conditional Formatting.
After you’ve selected the cells or range you want to format, click Conditional Formatting on the View menu.
On the Conditional Formatting tab, click Manage Rules.
Under Add a new rule, select Highlight Cell Rules.
Highlight Cells Rules
You can also use conditional formatting to highlight cells that meet multiple criteria. To do this, click Add a new rule and select Highlight Cell Rules. Under Add a new rule, select Highlight Cell Rules and then choose the appropriate option from the drop-down menu:
- Greater Than or Less Than – For example, you could highlight all of your expenses that are greater than $1000.
- Contains – You could highlight any dates that contain “August” in them (for example, August 1st). This will not work if you want to highlight all dates between two points in time — see below for more information on how to handle this situation!
In the Style area, select a format.
In the Style area, select a format.
- You can use the color picker to select a color.
- You can select a pattern.
- You can select a font style (bold or italic).
- You can select font size.
- You can choose whether or not you want borders around your cells and if those borders should be colored or not by clicking on “Borders” in the Styles section at the bottom of your sheet (it’s next to “Font”).
To change the color of the highlighted cells, click More Colors .
To change the color of the highlighted cells, click More Colors .
In the Conditional formatting rules manager dialog box, select Cell value is in a list and then choose Custom List from the drop-down menu. In the Create New Rule dialog box that appears, enter your custom rule settings:
- Enter a name for your custom list. This is what will appear in Google Sheets when you apply conditional formatting based on this rule. For example, if you’re entering a list of colors (like red or green), enter “My Colours”.
- Select Color as your condition type and choose one or more colors from a palette by clicking any cell in it (this will automatically fill out all other options). If you don’t see any colors available for selection here yet but want them anyway–for example because there were no colours selected when creating this new rule–click New Color Group at bottom left corner instead then choose Edit Rules/Settings before continuing with steps 4-6 below…
Click OK to save your conditional formatting settings.
To apply conditional formatting to a cell or range of cells, click the Conditional Formatting button in the Home tab. In this example, we’re going to highlight cells that contain negative values with red text.
Click on Highlight Cell Rules and choose Equal To from the dropdown menu. Enter a value of -1 into the first box (this will be your condition), then select Red Text from the second box (this is what will happen if your condition is met). Click OK when done:
You can use Google Sheets’ conditional formatting features to make important data stand out.
You can use conditional formatting to highlight cells that meet certain criteria. For example, you might want to highlight all of the cells in a column that are above or below a certain value.
To do this, select the cell(s) that contain the data you’d like to highlight (for example, if you want to highlight all of the rows where sales were above $10 million in 2018), then click Conditional Formatting under Cell Styles in your menu bar and choose Highlight Cells Rules > Top/Bottom Rules > Top N Values Above Or Below…
In this menu, specify how many standard deviations away from your chosen mean value should be highlighted with red ink by entering an integer between 0-100 as well as an option for whether or not negative values should also be highlighted (you probably won’t want them). When finished entering these values click OK at which point Google Sheets will perform some calculations behind-the-scenes before displaying your results as shown below:
Conditional formatting is a powerful tool that can help you spot trends and patterns in your data. If you’re looking for a way to make your Google Sheets more visually appealing, this feature is one way to do it.
