conditional formatting

Excel 2007 Conditional Formatting

Excel has made numerous changes in its conditional formatting between 2003 and 2007. Most of the new features I think are great, though there are a lot of problems with backward compatibility.

One thing I discovered this week is a trap for the unwary.

In Excel 2003 it was easy to create a conditional format for a cell, and then copy that cell or even just the formatting for that cell to other cells, and the conditional formatting would be copied also. Of course it pays to make sure that you correctly apply absolute and relative cell references in the conditional formatting if using formulas. And using paste special or the format painter you could copy just the formatting from once cell to another - including the conditional formatting.

Excel 2007 Tips

Jean Philippe Bagel works for Microsoft. He has written some great tips for Excel 2007.

Of course the right click on the sheet tab navigation buttons will work in older versions of Excel and is a great way of navigating rapidly through large workbooks. Navipane provides a great alternative that is not as limited as Excels built in display of available sheet tabs.

Excel 2007 has some very advanced and easy to use conditional formatting and Jean explains one very well. However please be very careful with using this feature in any Excel 2007 workbooks that need to be viewed or edited on a Excel 2003 or lower machine. The conditional formatting in 2007 inst backward compatible. In fact it is quite different in both how it works and how it displays to previous versions of Excel.

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