Conditional formatting

Conditional formatting in Excel 2007 (and later) allows us to colour cells on a spreadsheet depending on whether or not they meet certain conditions. While it existed to some degree in Excel 2003, it has been seriously beefed up in Excel 2007 and later.

This particular tutorial was born from a request on a Facebook group. One of the users asked me how they would format a list of names and addresses to change colour depending on date of last contact. I thought this would make an interesting tutorial and here it is.

In the tutorial I use absolute formulas (use of dollar sign) and if you are not familiar with how to use this, you can check out this tutorial on fixing a cell, and this one on fixing a column. 

[flowplayer src=’https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/the-excel-expert/conditional_formatting_date_of_last_contact.m4v’]

You can download the original file here (so you can practise on it) or you can view the completed file here. I hope you enjoy this video on Excel Conditional formatting