Excel 2010 Conditional Formatting

Virtually everyone knows that you can use Excel to store and calculate values. Just about as many people also know that you can format the information stored in a worksheet. You can control all sorts of ways that the information in a cell (or range of cells) is displayed--change the font size, the weight of the font, the color used, how many decimal places it uses, its alignment in the cell, and on and on.What if you wanted the way that a cell appears to be based on some condition, however? For instance, you might want the text in a cell to be bold if the value is above some threshold or you might want the typeface to be red if the value is negative. This is where conditional formatting comes into play--the application of formats based upon criteria that you specify.The conditional formatting capabilities of Excel are impressive and can be very powerful. All you need to do is picture how you want your data to appear, and then figure out the criteria that should be met in order for the formatting to be applied. Whenever the values change on which your conditional formatting is based, Excel changes the formatting to reflect those changed values.To make conditional formatting even more powerful, Excel allows you to define multiple criteria to be applied to a cell or range of cells. Each criterion can have different formatting characteristics associated with that criterion. Thus, you could have one criterion that applies if a value is under a lower threshold, one that applies if the value is between the lower threshold and an upper threshold, and a third that applies if the value is over the upper threshold.The way in which you can use conditional formatting is limited only by your imagination. Excel allows most of its formatting power to be applied based on the criteria that you dream up. In Excel 2007 Conditional Formatting you'll find plenty of information about conditional formatting, but it is not the dry, lifeless information you'll often find in computer books.Excel 2007 Conditional Formatting zeroes in on what you need to know to understand and put conditional formatting to work right away. You'll also find ideas on how to make conditional formatting fit your needs. You'll discover ways to stretch your knowledge and enhance how you can present the data in your worksheets.