You probably only see that all your values are probably gone/hidden. Your Conditional Formatting is now completed. So choose a Color of White from the Font Tab: To do this, we need to set the format of the text in that cell to be the same as the cell color so that it looks like it has been removed.
Since we can’t remove the value, we can ‘fake’ hide the value of the cell. Therefore, we want to not show the value of that cell. In our case when the formula is true that means that that it does not start with the letter we want. Okay, so now if the formula we just entered is true then we need to sent the format with the “Format…” button on the bottom right side of the “New Formatting Rule” dialog box. When it is TRUE, the Conditional Formatting will be applied to the cell. When it is FALSE, no Conditional Formatting will be applied to the cell. If it equals Cell B1’s value, then it is True, else it is False. This formula will return a TRUE or FALSE by looking at the first character in the text of cell B6 and if that character does not equal the value we put in b1. But plenty of Female “S” names have like Samantha,Sandra,Sarah,Shirley,Sophia andSusan. As a matter of fact, no Male name starting with “S” has made the Top 5 in the last 100 years. Turns out that my name “Steve” has never been in the Top 5 for the last 100 years. That is a lot easier to see what names are popular based on what I care about. Now what if you wanted to only see all the names that begin with the Letter “E”? This would be a great way to create some conditional formatting to hide names that you don’t want to see.Īs an example, the last 5 years of females names looks like this:
However, when you look at all the 1000 names in the spreadsheet, your mind may start to spin. That is like 100 Years! I found the data from the Social Security Administration: Īnd things have changed over the years.
Okay, at the bottom of this blog post is a FREE Excel Download File that contains all the Top 5 Baby Names both Female and Male from 1912-2011. If you found the website and tutorials helpful, please consider donating to keep the lights on. TRUE = the conditional formatting rule will apply and the formatting from this rule will be applied. We don’t need to return a value but instead we need to compare something and if it is If someone had just told me that, it would have saved me a lot of time and would have helped me immensely.Ģ) The second TIP is to write your conditional formatting rule so that it compares something and either returns a TRUE or FALSE. I don’t know if this caused you headaches and misunderstandings with Excel, but it did for me. Just write the Excel Custom Conditional Rule Formula in terms of one cell and then Excel applies that formula to every cell that you have added to the conditional format range. HIGHLIGHT YOUR RANGE AND THEN WRITE THE FORMULA IN TERMS OF THE TOP LEFT CELL IN THE RANGE. Have you had a similar problem/lack of Excel knowledge?ġ) The first TRICK to writing conditional format rules and formulas is to: 2) How-to Write a Conditional Format Rule Formula that handles an entire range.