Excel | Vlad Talks Tech

Conditional Formatting in Microsoft Excel – Highlight Cells

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 24 Sep 2024 12:00:00 GMT

Excel’s conditional formatting can transform raw data into meaningful insights. In this clip from my Conditional Formatting in Microsoft Excel, you’ll explore how to apply conditional formatting in Excel by using Highlight Cells!

Full Conditional Formatting in Microsoft Excel Course

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Learning conditional formatting is a lot more fun inside a demo environment. So, let’s start with the Highlight Cell Rules. First, let me go to the claim amount over here, where I have all the claims in my auto-claims Excel file. What I want to do is select all of it, and then to quickly access conditional formatting, we have it here in the ribbon inside the Home category. I can click on it, and then I will see the five different types of conditional formatting that we just talked about in the slides: Highlight Cell Rules, Top and Bottom Rules, Data Bars, Color Scales, and Icon Sets.

But for this demo, let’s focus on Highlight Cell Rules. What I want to do for this first demo is highlight in red all the different claims that are over $4,000. So, I will select “Greater Than,” and now I’ll have a new popup that appears in which I will be able to select my options. Remember, the first part is my condition: highlight cells that are greater than $4,000. Then, I choose my formatting. Do I want it to be a light red fill with dark red text, a yellow fill with dark yellow text, a green fill with dark green text, and a few more built-in options? But of course, we can build our own.

Let me start with the light red fill with dark red text here. Click on OK, and it’s done. If ever you have a cell you see here, I selected the claim amount. I don’t want it to apply to the claim amount as well. I can always go to Conditional Formatting here, clear rules, and only clear the rule from the selected cell. Now, every single cell in the values I selected that are greater than $4,000 are now shown with a red background and red text. Remember, we said greater than, not greater or equal to, so this one that is exactly $4,000 will not show up. But if I change it to $4,001, the conditional formatting will now apply. So, it’s very, very important to be exact in the conditional formatting that you want, especially when you build that condition.

Now, let’s take a look at another example. Let’s take the claim status over here. What I want to do now is, as long as they’re approved, show them in green. So again, I selected a column. I’ll go to Conditional Formatting, Highlight Cell Rules, when it’s equal to or a text that contains. Both of them would work in this case. Let’s go with “Equal To.” Let me type in “approved,” and I will apply a green fill with dark green text. That’s it. Now, of course, as values change, so if I take this one over here and then I change the value to “approved,” it will now show in green. So, it’s dynamic. As long as it’s in the cells that we apply this formatting to, whenever you change the data, the formatting will apply or go away depending on your condition. Awesome. Let’s take a look at another one.

Have you ever opened an Excel file and then tried to import it into another tool, and it says, “Hey, I cannot do that because you have duplicate values,” or you simply want to find duplicate values inside an Excel file? Well, I can simply select this here, go to Conditional Formatting, Highlight Cell Rules, and Duplicate Values here, which is one of the built-in options, and I can either find duplicate or unique values. But in my case, I want to find duplicate values, so let’s fill them with yellow over here. You can see that I have 15 twice over here. This should have been 16. Let me fix it. Now the formatting went away on both because none of them are duplicate anymore. And I had another one here. Let me fix it. Perfect. So, you can quickly highlight duplicate values inside a column.

Before we finish this demo, I also want to show you the Conditional Formatting Manager. So, I’ll go under Conditional Formatting, then I will go to Manage Rules. By default, this will show you all the rules for the current selection, but I can also see all the rules for this worksheet. You can see the duplicate values apply to the A column, if the cell value equals to “approved” applies to my Y column, and if the cell value is over $4,000 applies to my H column over here. You can see this one actually has a limit just because we didn’t apply it to the top one there. We removed it, so it shows a bit different. You can always go on a rule, so I’ll double-click on it.

You see when I mentioned that if it was $4,000, it was not applying because we said greater than. I can change it to greater than or equal to, apply it over here, and now you saw some of them, like the $4,000 over here, changed because it now fixed the condition. Something else that I can do is maybe I don’t like the red formatting. I want to have formatting that applies to my company brand. What I can do is go back to the rule here, and then near the preview, go to Format here, and then I can change what is the font that I want. Do I want an underline? What is the color that I want?

Let me go to white here, and then under Fill, I can go to More Colors here and then maybe pick something that is more on-brand. So, I want this magenta over here. Of course, if you want to follow your company brand, you’re better off copying the hex code and pasting it here. But let’s click on OK. We can go to Font is white, and click on OK. Here we have a preview. Let’s apply it, and now my formatting changed with some custom colors. But this is it. This is how easy it is to apply conditional formatting by highlighting cells that fit a certain criteria.

Generate Formula Columns in Excel with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 05 Mar 2024 18:39:00 GMT

In this video, learn to generate formula columns with Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel. I hope you enjoy this clip from my full Pluralsight course on Microsoft 365 Copilot!

FULL Course on Copilot in Microsoft 365 Apps (Microsoft Office)

Video Summary

Here are the key points from the video:

Using Copilot for Formulas: The speaker is excited about using Copilot in Excel to create formulas, such as calculating total cost per product or total profit for marketing campaigns in 2024.
Practical Examples: They demonstrate asking Copilot to add a column that calculates the number of days between the date of an accident and the date of a claim, which Copilot does efficiently.
Combining Data: Another example shows Copilot combining vehicle year, make, and model into a single column, making the data more concise and readable.
Sample Data: The speaker mentions that Copilot can provide sample data for practice, which is useful for tutorials and experimenting with different prompts.
Profit Calculation: They push the boundaries by asking Copilot to calculate total profit for marketing campaigns, which involves understanding that profit is revenue minus budget. Copilot successfully adds the column, showing which campaigns are profitable.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Our next task that we can use Copilot on is working with formulas. This is one of my favorites as I always have trouble creating Excel formulas, so I’m glad Copilot can help. We can ask Copilot to, for example, calculate the total cost per product in a new column. Another example is to ask Copilot to add a column that calculates the total profit for each marketing campaign in 2024. We can also work with it to add a column that calculates the number of days after the product launch event. Now that we have talked about the theory, let’s head back to the lab and see how we can work with formulas with Copilot in Excel.

We’re back in the lab. Let me open up the Excel file; it will still be our auto claims Excel file. By the way, I just wanted to mention that I will put the Excel file in the exercise files together with the prompt, so if ever you’re looking to do the same thing that I’m doing, you’re able to download it from there and also try the prompts yourself. But you know what I want to do? Let’s go here and let’s ask Copilot to add a column that calculates the difference in days between the date of claim and the date of accident. So you see here, I have a date of the accident and then I have a date of the claim. I want to see how long it usually takes people before they do it, and maybe I even want to see the correlation between whether it’s approved or not. So let’s add that column here, one thing at a time. So I’m simply asking Copilot to add the column and do the calculation for me. Let’s give it a few seconds and see what it comes up with. There we go, so Copilot finished. You can see here’s a suggestion for you: it calculates the number of days between the date of accident and the date of claim for each entry in the table. It shows me the formula, which is awesome. It will explain the formula for me as well, and I can add the column at the end. There we go, it added it for me, so now I have this data inside my table. Great!

I can also ask it to do another one here. Let’s say, add a column that combines the vehicle year, the vehicle make, and vehicle model. This way, I don’t have, like, say, Hyundai Elantra 2016 inside three different columns. I want to have a nice column that says 2016 Hyundai Elantra. So let’s go and ask Copilot to do that. It should be pretty fast again. It will show me what the formula it did is and then allow me to add it to the table. There we go, it finished. So again, if we go here, here’s a suggestion for you: it concatenates the vehicle year, make, and model into a single string to provide a more detailed description. There, and then I have what the formula is. See, only if I hover over it would I see what it looks like. This way, I can preview it, which is awesome. Let’s insert the column, and there we go, we have it.

Okay, last thing before we finish up, something else I wanted to show you. If I go and start a new sheet over here, you see if I start from blank, Copilot is still open here. In addition to the file that I gave you, you can also have Copilot in Excel give you sample data. This is how a lot of the videos you might see or tutorials that do not have data might just use the sample data that Excel gives us. If we do try an example here, see, we have information about marketing campaigns such as campaign owner, campaign name, launch date, campaign type, budget, revenue, and so on. Again, you can use many of the prompts we talked about, or you know what, just take this data and try and see what kind of questions you can ask it. So here, I just asked it to add a column that calculates the total profit for each marketing campaign. Now you see, I’m a bit pushing the boundaries here because Copilot would need to understand that profit is the revenue minus the budget. And there we go, you see it figured it out, and now I can add the column and I can see which ones are profitable and some of them were not profitable at all. But if ever you want to try it out, you can always just, in a new tab, get Copilot in Excel to give you data. If not, you will always have the auto claims sample data in the exercise files. But this is it for this demo on how we can use Copilot in Excel to generate formula columns. It works really great. This is also the last demo for this module on Excel, so let’s head back to the slides and finish off the module.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Excel | Highlight, Sort, & Filter Your Data

Vlad Catrinescu — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 18:26:00 GMT

Copilot for Excel is your AI Assistant that simply knows everything! In this video, part of my full course on Microsoft 365 Copilot, you will learn how you can use Microsoft 365 Copilot in Excel to Highlight, Sort, and Filter Your Data!

FULL Course on Copilot in Microsoft 365 Apps (Microsoft Office)

Video Summary

You can ask Copilot in Excel to highlight the top 10 values in a column, such as the claim amount column, by bolding or changing the font color.
Copilot can sort data in a column from smallest to largest, making it easier to see the cheapest or most expensive items.
You can filter data to show specific criteria, like only displaying claims for Toyota cars made after 2018, even if there are minor spelling mistakes in your request.
If you don’t like the changes Copilot makes, you can easily undo them using the undo button in Excel.
Copilot provides real-time feedback and status updates while processing your requests, ensuring you know when tasks are completed.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Next up in our list of spreadsheet productivity tips is using Copilot to highlight, sort, and filter your data. Some examples that we can ask Copilot to help us with are to bold the top 10 values in the sales column. We can also ask Copilot to sort the engagement rate from smallest to largest, or you can ask Copilot to filter items that are due next week. Now that we have seen a bit of example prompts, let’s head over to the lab and check out how we can use Copilot in Excel to highlight, sort, and filter your data.

Back in the lab environment, let me open up Excel over here where I’m back in our same document. Let’s go to the top. So what can I ask Copilot to do? I can ask Copilot to bold the top 10 values in the claim amount column. So let’s go here, let’s press on enter. I just want to have them bolded. It will take a few seconds, and if everything goes well, we will have all the top ones bolded. There we go, it finished. You can see I have this one here, the 8,000, 7,000, 9,000, so really the most expensive ones have been bolded. But I don’t really like it. I don’t like the change; it’s not really what I wanted. I can always go here. If Excel does a change to your table, a change to your data, you’ll have an undo button over here. So you see it says done. I made the following changes: I bolded and applied a black font to the top 10 items in that column. I don’t like it. I can click on undo, and there we go, it undid the change. Instead, you know what I want? I want Copilot in Excel to highlight in yellow the top 10 values in the claim amount column. This way, they will pop up more. We will give it a few seconds, especially when you do changes to your data. It always takes a bit more seconds, but you’ll always see the status here where it says almost there, finishing up, applying the changes to the table, and things like that. So depending on how much data you have, it might take one or two seconds, or it can take 10-15 seconds. There we go, now it started doing it. You can see that the top most expensive claims have now been highlighted in yellow, and we also have the confirmation from Copilot that it was done. Perfect.

Now we looked at highlighting and bolding. What if I want to ask Copilot to sort the claim amount from smallest to largest? This way, I don’t see them by claim ID, I don’t see them by year; I just want to see the cheapest ones at the top and scroll down to see the most expensive ones. Now, of course, if it did a good job in the previous prompt, all the largest ones should be at the bottom of the sheet. There we go, as I was talking, it did the change. Let’s go to the bottom here, and all of the ones at the bottom have been highlighted, so it did a good job in the first prompt as well. But now we have a bit of a double confirmation. Great, so good job so far. Let’s do another one. You see that sometimes I just click on a random cell, and then Copilot doesn’t like that. If I ever do it, it says, “Vlad, you need to select data in an Excel table.” So you need to make sure you have some data in the table selected in order to interact with Copilot, because if not, you see it’s grayed out, and I cannot do anything. So let me go back in the table here, and I want to ask it, let’s do some filtering as well. Filter to only show claims of Toyota cars with the vehicle year after 2018. And yes, I have a spelling mistake in there. It’s on purpose. You see it does tell me that I have a spelling mistake, but it doesn’t matter. I want to make sure that it works. Copilot is usually intelligent enough to see those small spelling mistakes and adjust accordingly without giving you random errors because you did a tiny spelling mistake. So we will give it a few seconds here to finish and ignore my spelling mistake. There we go, it’s now finishing up. So I only see Toyotas, that’s good, and I only see Toyotas later than 2018. As you can see, I have my filters here that are greater than 2018. Of course, maybe I wanted to say that are 2018 or older, then it would have done greater than or equal to, but it did exactly what I wanted it to do. I just asked Copilot in Excel to filter my data.

So this is it for this demo in which we have seen how we can use Copilot in Excel to highlight data, whether it’s bolding or highlighting, to sort our data, and to filter our data. But we’re not done yet with what Copilot in Excel can do, so let’s head back to the slides and learn more things that we can do with Copilot in Microsoft Excel.