The Highlight Cells Rules and Top/Bottom Rules options on Excel’s Conditional Formatting drop-down menu enable you to quickly identify cell entries of partic- ular interest in various cell ranges in your worksheet.
The options on the Highlight Cells Rules continuation menu enable you to set formats that identify values that are greater than, less than, equal to, or even FIGURE 3-20:
Sample worksheet with
three identical cell ranges formatted with Excel’s Data Bars, Color Scales, and Icon Sets options.
CHAPTER 3 Making It All Look Pretty
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between particular values that you set. This menu also contains an option for set- ting special formats for identifying cells that contain particular text (such as Yes, No, or even Maybe answers in a data list) or certain dates (such as project mile- stones and deadlines).
Perhaps one of the most useful options on the Highlight Cells Rules continuation menu is the Duplicate Values option that enables you to flag duplicate entries in a cell range by assigning them a special formatting. Doing this not only makes it easy to visually identify duplicate entries in a data list or table but also to find them electronically by searching for their particular formatting characteristics.
(See Chapter 6 for details on searching your worksheets.)
The options on the Top/Bottom Rules continuation menu enable you to specially format and, therefore, easily identify values in data tables and lists that are either above or below the norm. These options not only include those for automatically formatting all values in a range that are among the top 10 highest or lowest (either in value or percentage) but also above or below the average (as calculated by dividing the total by the number of values).
In addition to using the ready-made rules for conditional formatting located on the Highlight Cells Rules and Top/Bottom Rules continuation menus, you can also create your own custom rules. When you create a custom rule, you not only specify the rule type that identifies which values or text entries to format, but also you format the colors and other aspects included in the formatting. (For details on creating custom conditional formats, consult my Excel 2019 All-in-One For
Dummies.)
Formatting via the Quick Analysis tool
One of the quickest and easiest ways to apply Data Bars, Color Scales, Icon Set, Greater Than, or Top 10% conditional formatting to a data table is with the Excel 2019’s Quick Analysis tool. The coolest thing about applying conditional format- ting in this manner is that Live Preview lets you visualize how your data looks with a particular type of conditional formatting before you actually apply it.
To assign conditional formatting with the Quick Analysis tool, select the data in your table that you wanted formatted and then select the Quick Analysis tool. By default, the Formatting option is selected when Excel displays the tool’s palette so that all you have to do is highlight each of the formatting options with your mouse or Touch pointer to see how they will look on your data.
Figure 3-21 shows you the Live Preview of the financial data in the Mother Goose 2016 Sales table with the Data Bars conditional formatting (as the Data Bars but- ton is highlighted in the Formatting options). To assign this conditional format to
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the financial data in the selected table, you simply click the Data Bars button on the Quick Analysis palette. To preview how the data would look formatted with another conditional format, you simply highlight its button with the mouse or Touch pointer.
Note that if you click the Greater Than button on the Quick Analysis palette, Excel displays a Greater Than dialog box where you specify the threshold value in the Format Cells That Are Greater Than text box, as well as select the color of the for- matting for all the cells above that threshold in the drop-down list to its right.
With all the other kinds of conditional formats (Data Bars, Color Scales, Icon Set, and Top 10%), Excel just goes ahead and applies the first (default) option for that kind of formatting that you find on the Conditional Formatting button’s drop- down menus on the Ribbon.
FIGURE 3-21:
Previewing conditional formatting in a data table using the Quick Analysis tool.
CHAPTER 4 Going Through Changes
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Chapter 4
Going Through Changes
P
icture this: You just fi nished creating, formatting, and printing a major project with Excel — a workbook with your department’s budget for the next fi scal year. Because you fi nally understand a little bit about how the Excel thing works, you fi nish the job in crack time. You’re actually ahead of schedule.You turn the workbook over to your boss so that she can check the numbers. With plenty of time for making those inevitable last-minute corrections, you’re feeling on top of this situation.
Then comes the reality check — your boss brings the document back, and she’s plainly agitated. “We forgot to include the estimates for the temps and our over- time hours. They go right here. While you’re adding them, can you move these rows of fi gures up and those columns over?”
IN THIS CHAPTER
» Opening workbook fi les for editing
» Undoing your boo-boos
» Moving and copying with drag and drop
» Copying formulas
» Moving and copying with Cut, Copy, and Paste
» Deleting cell entries
» Deleting and inserting columns and rows
» Spell-checking the worksheet
» Verifying cell entries with Text to Speech
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As she continues to suggest improvements, your heart begins to sink. These mod- ifications are in a different league than, “Let’s change these column headings from bold to italic and add shading to that row of totals.” Clearly, you’re looking at a lot more work on this baby than you had contemplated. Even worse, you’re looking at making structural changes that threaten to unravel the very fabric of your beautiful worksheet.
As the preceding fable points out, editing a worksheet in a workbook can occur on different levels:
»
You can make changes that affect the contents of the cells, such as copying a row of column headings or moving a table to a new area in a particular worksheet.»
You can make changes that affect the structure of a worksheet itself, such as inserting new columns or rows (so that you can enter new data originally left out) or deleting unnecessary columns or rows from an existing table so that you don’t leave any gaps.»
You can even make changes to the number of worksheets in a workbook (by either adding or deleting sheets).In this chapter, you discover how to make these types of changes safely to a workbook. As you see, the mechanics of copying and moving data or inserting and deleting rows are simple to master. It’s the impact that such actions have on the worksheet that takes a little more effort to understand. Not to worry! You always have the Undo feature to fall back on for those (hopefully rare) times when you make a little tiny change that throws an entire worksheet into complete and utter chaos.
In the final section of this chapter (“Eliminating Errors with Text to Speech”), you find out how to use the Text to Speech feature to check out and confirm the accu- racy of the data entries you make in your worksheets. With Text to Speech, you can listen to your computer read back a series of cell entries while you visually corroborate their accuracy from the original source document. Text to Speech can make this sort of routine and otherwise labor-intensive editing much easier and greatly increase the accuracy of your spreadsheets.