One of Excel's most underrated features for project management is conditional formatting. This simple tool allows you to visually represent project data, keep tasks on track, and see which ones ...

If your data contains spilled arrays, you can't format it as an Excel table. In this scenario, keep your manual table formatting to a minimum, such as using bold font in the column headers.

Excel offers several built-in conditional formatting rules you can apply to your data. (Click image to enlarge it.) We’ll demonstrate using Excel for Windows under a Microsoft 365 subscription.

When the Format Cells dialog box opens, it's automatically set to display Excel's numeric-data format options. Select a format category that matches your data type.

If that option isn’t selected (which sometimes happens in the Mac version of Excel), just select it. I cleaned the data up a bit by hiding a few columns I don’t use (select column(s) > right ...

As mentioned in the intro, you can use conditional formatting to make certain values stand out with colored text and backgrounds. You can, for example, indicate problem data values in red, and ...

How to group the data in Excel. Because we’re formatting groups, the data must be grouped before you begin. If your data is already sorted by the grouping values, then you can skip this step.

To get started, select the data you want to format in Excel, in this case, that’s C3:F6 and do the following: On the Home tab, click Conditional Formatting (in the Styles group) and choose New Rule.

Date Formatting. Excel gives you quite a few options to choose from under Number > Date in the Format ... you can sort and filter by color once you apply any kind of color formatting to your data.

Your spreadsheets don't have to be dry, soul-killing pages of numbers. With Excel 2007's conditional formatting, you can add all sorts of eye-catching visuals to your data.