Color coding the data points in our worksheets is a great way to quickly surface trends, and we can use conditional formatting to easily spot cells that contain whatever values were interested in!
Check out last week’s attendance sheet in the GIF above for an example. We’ve got a record of which days each employee was absent and which days they were present, and our boss wants us to highlight all of the absent days in red to easily identity them.
To do this, all we need to do is select all of our data, open the conditional formatting drop down, and select “New Rule.” We’ll set the rule type as “format only cells that contain” (since we want to highlight cells that contain the word absent), set the operator as “equal to” and enter “absent” as the definition.
Now that we’ve created the rule, we need to specify the formatting! We’ll press the format button and select a red fill color, hit okay, and watch as any cells that contain the word absent are highlighted before our eyes. Good luck playing hooky next week 👀.
