In this example, I can see that in March there were a number of transactions that were made. What I'd like to do is I'd like to highlight the sale amount. I know that when sales are above 200, then that employee will get a bonus. I'd like to highlight that, so I'm gonna choose conditional formatting to help me out. So I'm gonna hit Alt + H to go to the home ribbon, and then L for conditional formatting. I'm now going to choose highlight cell rules as my first rule. This gives me the option to use greater than, and I'm going to choose greater than 200. I don't need to type that in myself. I can see in the background, Excel's given me a preview of what this will look like, and I can change the formatting. I'm gonna go with green fill with dark green text.

It's now more obvious to me which employees will be receiving a bonus. Excel allows me to apply multiple conditional formattings. So if I hit Alt + H + L again, let's have a look at some of the others. Data bars allows me to see gradient fill. I can see the highest numbers, such as the one at the top, 250.3, is quite filled with this blue bar, with the one underneath, the 31.8, is relatively empty with its blue bar. I could go for color scales, and color scales would have in a dark green those figures that are deemed to be best. And in red, those figures that are deemed to be worst. This acts like a traffic light system, and allows me to zero in on colors that are of more interest to me. Icon sets are also very useful. With icon sets, you can apply certain icons. I particularly like the four or five arrows. So if I click on this one, I can now see that an up arrow is towards the good end of the spectrum, red arrow at the bottom, and the yellow arrows somewhere in between.

One more to add in, Alt + H + L. I want to apply the top bottom rule. I want to look at, it says the top 10 items. I'd like to change that. I'd like to change that to the top one, and I'll apply a yellow fill with a dark yellow text so I can see my top performer.

Great. Now, if you create too many rules or you create one in error, you can manage them. So I'll select those cells again. I'll hit Alt + H + L, and then the bottom one, manage rules, allows me to look at the rules I've got. I can simply click on that, and then I can delete the rule that I want to get rid of.