You can change the appearance of cells to place attention on individual values or a range of values. The appearance can be based on the location of the cell within the grid, or on the underlying value of the cell. Formatting that is based on such a condition is called a conditional appearance. All cells that meet the condition will have the appearance applied to them.
Applying appearances
You can apply conditional appearances in the following ways:
| • | Apply formatting to a column by selecting Column Appearance... or Conditional Appearance... from the Appearance sub menu in the context menu of the most nested member on the columns |
| • | Apply formatting to a row by selecting Row Appearance... or Conditional Appearance... from the Appearance sub menu in the context menu of the most nested member on the rows |
| • | Apply formatting to a cell by selecting the Appearance... item from the cell context menu |
A conditional appearances is built up out of two parts: the conditions and the appearance to be applied.
A condition can be based on the location of a cell, the value of a cell or both. For example, when we want to color the background of all cells in a column, a single condition would be needed, like Column = <Column Name>. If you only want to color the values in that column that have a value larger than 1000, you would need an additional condition, like Value > $1000.
For example, applying a condition to a single column will look like the following in the conditional appearance dialog:
An appearance that is applied to a single cell would look like this:
If the Meet All Conditions check is turned off, the appearance would be applied to all cells that are either in the Graduate Degree column or the France Row.
To only apply a condition when the cell value meets a certain condition, you can add a condition by clicking the Add... button; this will bring up the condition properties dialog:
In this dialog, you can specify if this is a value (select Cell value from the first drop-down) or a location based condition (select Column or Row from the first drop-down). If you select a cell value based condition, you can indicate the type of the comparison that must be met by included cells, and the comparison value(s). The following comparison types are supported:
Between |
Include cells with a value between value1 and value2 |
Not between |
Include cells with a value not between value1 and value2 |
= |
Include cells with a value equal to value |
<> |
Include cells with a value not equal to value |
> |
Include cells with a value larger than value |
>= |
Include cells with a value larger than or equal to value |
< |
Include cells with a value less than value |
<= |
Include cells with a value less than or equal to value |
After adding a value condition, the conditions part of the dialog looks as follows:
You can delete added conditions by selecting a condition and pressing the Delete button.
Appearances
An appearance is the type of formatting that is applied to a cell.
Several types of appearances are supported:
Regular appearance
In a regular appearance, you can change the foreground (text) and background colors of the cell and also the font used for the text. You can optionally apply a gradient for the background color.
Data Bar appearance
See this topic for more information.
Icon Set appearance
See this topic for more information.
Color Range appearance
See this topic for more information.
Managing conditional appearances
You can manage, i.e. add, remove and edit, conditional appearances from the conditional appearances window.