A new Excel 2007 conditional formatting trick

Simon Hurst describes a simple, but previously overlooked enhancement to conditional formatting options in the latest version of Microsoft's spreadsheet program. I was researching some of the perhaps less obvious aspects of the enhancements in Excel 2007 and came across something that was all too obvious, but that I had previously missed, about Excel 2007's dramatically improved conditional formatting feature. For anyone that has so far escaped conditional formatting, it sort of does what is says – it changes the formatting of a cell or block of cells depending on whether the cell or cells meet a condition. The feature did exist in previous versions of the program, but was limited to a total of three conditions, and the use of Excel's basic cell formatting capabilities. ExcelZone has looked at it in the past including in the oddly titled: "What would Zaphod Beeblebrox do with Excel?" and the rather more straightforward "Excel 2007 - Get ahead with conditional formatting" which covered the new 2007 features. Where Excel 2003 and before was limited to 'ordinary' formatting, Excel 2007 introduced formats specific to conditional formatting, in particular data bars and icon sets. Data bars display a coloured bar the length of which relates to the value in the cell, whereas icon sets display a different icon from a set of three to five different icons in a set, again depending on the value. At their most basic, both simply involve selecting a block of cells, choosing the conditional formatting option from the Styles section of the Excel 2007 Home ribbon tab, and then clicking on your preferred option.