Archive: MS Excel

Excel – Highlight Cells That Meet Specific Criteria with Conditional Formatting

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

How to use MS Excel conditional formatting to change text/background colors of cells automatically

Excel conditional formatting

When doing some Excel-based marketing report, whether it’s web analytic report or sales related report, most of the times, I used some conditional formatting to automatically highlight cells that meet certain criteria such as highlighting cells of under-performing or over-performing shops, under/over-performing regions for revenue reports; highlighting cells based on contract value; highlighting cells that have “N/A” or negative numbers; or highlighting cells of web pages that have poor performance in page visits for a certain period of time.  Read more...


Display Excel Data On a Web Page

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

How to quickly display data from a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to a webpage online

Display Excel data on website

At the company where I’m working we have a marketing calendar in MS Excel showing schedule for different marketing events and activities. The file is maintained by marketing and regularly updated with new speaking engagement opportunities or changes of venues to current events. And every time we updated it, we put a copy on a network or shared drive so that other people can access it. Later, we made it a little easier to access by putting a link to the Excel file on a web page.  Read more...


MS Excel 2010 Custom Colors

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

Create custom colors and apply them to charts and everything else
with Excel 2010

Excel 2010 Custom Colors

My company has just switched from Microsoft Office 2003 to MS Office 2010, and to my surprise, almost everything in the main menu of MS Excel was changed in 2010 version. That makes everything seem harder and more importantly makes my other post MS Excel 2003 Custom Colors outdated although it’s still valid and useful for those who are still using MS Excel 2003.

Here’s the update for MS Excel 2010:
Excel 2010 provides a bunch of built-in color palettes, but you can also create a custom palette from scratch and then apply your new color scheme to charts, tables or whatever automatically. The process only take minutes but would save you lots of time later on, and it’s one of the things that possibly makes Excel 2010 more… bearable.  Read more...


MS Excel 2010 Drop-down

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

How to create a dropdown in Excel 2010

drop-down list in Excel 2010

I have a similar post about making drop-down with Excel 2003, which has apparently become obsolete with the introduction of ribbon menu in Excel 2007/2010. Regardless of the changes, the general concept of creating a drop-down list in Excel 2010 is still the same as 2003: using Excel Data Validation List. The drop-down list is very useful in that it presents a limited number of options for users to select, users can’t enter their own input, thus limit potential errors and create more consistent output.  Read more...


MS Excel Dropdown List

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

Create a dropdown with Excel 2003

Dropdown list in Excel

If you’re using Excel 2010, click here for an updated post.

Just like a drop-down list on a web page, the drop-down list on an Excel spreadsheet presents a [limited] number of options for you to select, thus limit potential data entry errors and make the output more consistent and uniform. The drop-down list mentioned in this post has a down arrow button, but it is not the Filter/AutoFilter functionality of Excel, which can be accessed through menu Data > Filter > AutoFilter.  Read more...


MS Excel 2003 Custom Colors, Custom Chart Colors & Custom Color Palette

Last Updated by Michelle Sullivan

Apply RGB colors / custom colors/ custom color palette to MS Excel charts and text.

Excel custom chart color

Updated article for Excel 2010: Excel 2010 Custom Colors
The article below was written for Excel 2003; it’s still accurate and useful for Excel 2003 users. If you’re using Excel 2010, please click on the above link for a more relevant article.

Using consistent colors and color palette across different marketing tools and materials — ads, sale literature, web pages, spreadsheets and charts,… — are significantly important and beneficial. However, most of the time your business colors are not included inside Excel default color palette. If that’s the case, you’ll need to replace the default colors in Excel with your customized color palette. Here’s how:  Read more...