Page 198 - Excel 2013 All-in-One For Dummies

180 Conditional Formatting
3. Click the type of preset formatting (Red Fill with Dark Red Text, Yellow Fill with Dark Yellow Text, Green Fill with Dark Green Text, and so forth) or click the Custom Format option and select the custom formatting in the Format Cells dialog box.
If you define a custom format rather than select one of the preset for- mats, use the options on the Number, Font, Border, and Fill tabs of the Format Cells dialog box to designate all the formatting to be applied, and then click OK to close the Format Cells dialog box and return to the Compare Columns dialog box (where Custom Format appears in the third drop-down list box).
4. Click OK to close the Duplicate Values dialog box.
Excel then formats all the cells in the selected cell range whose values are
exact duplicates with the conditional formatting you selected.
Creating your own conditional formatting rules
Although Excel 2013 gives you a ton of ready-made Highlight Cell Rules and Top/Bottom Rules to define, you may still find that you need to create your own rules for conditional formatting. To do this, you choose the New Rule option near the bottom of the Conditional Formatting button’s drop-down menu or you click the New Rule button in the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager dialog box. (See the “Managing conditional formatting rules” sec- tion that immediately follows.)
Figure 2-23 shows you the New Formatting Rule dialog box as it first appears after clicking the New Rule option or button. To create a new conditional formatting rule, you first click the type of rule to create in the Select a Rule Type list box and then specify the criteria and define the formatting using the various options that appear in the Edit the Rule Description section below — note that these options vary greatly depending on the type of rule you click in the Select a Rule Type list box above.
Select the Use a Formula to Determine Which Cells to Format rule type when you want to build a formula as the rule that determines when a particular type of conditional formatting is applied. Note that this formula can refer to cells outside the current cell selection to which the conditional formatting
is applied, but it must be a logical formula, meaning that it uses comparison operators (see Book III, Chapter 1) and/or Logical functions (see Book III, Chapter 2) that when calculated return either a logical TRUE or FALSE value.