Microsoft Excel: Can I set it to show group a one colour and group b another colour?

[Katherine]

To clarify. I have a spreadsheet in excel which lists all my customers, contact details, when they are due to pay next and their status i.e if I've invoiced, If they've paid etc.

It would be much easier if I could show the paid ones on one colour and the non-paid in another so I know which to chase etc. All it needs is one column to have three options Paid, Invoiced and neither. And for each of these to be linked to a colour. It sounds simple enough but I'm not sure if its something I can do in excel. Anyone know? I just want to make viewing easier in a way which will change automatically.

Thanks
K

I'd add another column and call it 'status' at the top. Then note in that column whether they're Paid or Unpaid. Then put your cursor in the top left of the sheet and go into 'data' (you know, from file, edit etc, all those, there's one called data) at the top. Here you can either do a sort so that all the paids are together and all the unpaids are also together OR, much easier, just select 'autofilter' and this will put a filer on that column. You can then show either ALL or just PAID or just UNPAID. Is that clear?

ooh good question. I'm not aware that you can link colours to anything. colours seem to be stand alone and you can't seem to incorporate them into any type of formula.

for instance, if I've got a column with +/- , I would like the column of minuses say, red and the column of plus's black... but you just don't seem to be able to do it.

sorry, not very helpful i'm afraid. surely there's some other excel pros out there? anyone?

here's an example with autofilter on

oh, yes WWW. just avoid the colour thing and use filters instead eh. it's the only alternative i can think of.

Thank-you WWW - that is straight forward. Obviously I am trying to be too clever and should look for the easier approach.

BTW have you gone up in the world or are you another WWW?

You can do it daddyghoul, definitely, hang on let me go and look. It's v common to have minuses showing in red.

aaah, yes. you can get minuses to show in red text but i'm talking about colouring in cells. it was just an example. it would be nice to be able to link cell colours to formula.

I am the same www with hrh, everyone was doing it so I joined in and gave myself a title!

Oh I see. There's probably an if statement you can do but I can't do it off the top of my head!

I'm thinking 'FatherCooloftheColonies' whadya think?

Oh, you were DCool? I see, didn't get that in fact have no idea who most people are atm!

. i've never namechanged before. today was a first.

There is a function in the format menu called conditional formatting where you can set rules with formatting such as colour. So for example I've managed to create a column called status with 2 options - paid and invoiced. Then I can use CF to say if equal to paid then show as red, if equal to invoiced show as green, and its dead easy. Thought I'd cracked it when I saw that but it doesn't help that much visually as really I'd like that whole row to change colour and I can't find a way to extend the rule to other columns. Although there is an option which says by formula instead of by cell but can't figure that one out. think I need to create another dummy sheet and play with it, might be a way of sorting the X/- thing though.

No-one seems to have the same names anymore but I'm no good at thinking of clever ones.