1. Using conditional formatting
By using a feature known as Conditional formatting with your data, you can visually highlight information by formatting cells that meet certain criteria. The formatting will change automatically, depending on the value of the cell or formula.
2. Creating a simple rule
Conditional formatting works by using rules. There are many rules you can select from to get the desired result, or you can use a custom formula.
An example of this is highlighting all cells in a given range that are greater than 100 green. The greater than rule would be used for this.
First, lets look at the conditional formatting rules, before you move on to create a rule using the greater than condition.
Highlight your range and then go to Format, Conditional formatting. You will notice that all the cells in the range you have highlighted are green. Notice that the Format cells if option is set to Cell is not empty. This is the default.
3. Other rules
There are 18 different rule options you can select, which can be found under Format cells if. There are rules for the cells themselves, rules that apply to text in cells, Rules for dates, and the common, less than, greater than, between, and equal to, conditions.
4. Using greater than
For example, select greater than, type in the value you want all highlighted cells to be greater than, select a cell formatting style, and select Done.
To highlight the results, you can either highlight the cell background or the font used within the cell. You can use one of Sheets default formatting styles, or you can create your own.
5. Using a color scale
Conditional formatting even has the ability to use a color scale for cell backgrounds. You can select a minimum, maximum, and midpoint value, or again use one of the defaults or create your own style.
6. More about rules
There are a couple of things to remember when you are creating rules.
The first is Rule conflict. Be aware that if two rules clash, the higher rule in the list takes precedence and the condition of the other rule cannot be met. If you do have a clash, you could possibly get around it with formulas.
You can, however, move the rules up and down by putting your mouse over the three dots to the left of the rule and dragging up or down the list.
Editing rules is easy, just click on them to edit. If you want to delete them, select the rubbish bin to the right of the rule and delete.
7. Viewing all rules at once
The one drawback is that it's difficult to see all of your rules at once. To see a rule, you need to highlight the range that the rule applies to, or use named ranges. To see all the rules on a sheet, highlight the whole sheet using control A, then go to Format and conditional formatting.
8. Time to practice!
Time to set up a few conditional formatting rules to visually show off your relevant data.