How To Color Code Google Sheets
Learn how to effectively color code your Google Sheets using conditional formatting based on dropdown menus or specific text within cells. This tutorial covers step-by-step methods to enhance your spreadsheet's visual organization.
You can color code Google Sheets based on what the drop down menu is or even based on if there is a word that exists in a cell. I'm going to show you how to do this. We have a blank set of statuses and tasks and we want to say completed is green and in progress is yellow. So, well, we can create a drop down menu out of here. Right click, drop down. And for each of these items, we can add another one over do. We can select the color. Now color coding this way allows us to have this criteria in a drop down. We can click if we want the whole cell colored. We can go to advanced options and click arrow or plain text and the whole cell is color coded. But however, what if we want to have the entire row color
coded based on this status? We're going to have to go up to Format , Conditional Formatting . Here we're going to need to apply the whole range A colon C in this particular case. And Format Cells , Custom Formula , is equal to dollar sign A one equals completed in quotes. And let's do this nice green here. And click Done. And now if I. Change this to completed, even if I type it in, the whole row is colored. But what if I don't want the whole row, if I just want, maybe, one of these tasks have the report, the word report in it, I want to know which one it is and highlight it. I'm going to select that whole column, format, conditional formatting again, and instead of using custom formula, I can use just text.
here I can just write report. And now you see only the tasks that have report in it are colored. Let's color it yellow. If I want to have another word highlighted in another color, add another rule. And text contains budget. And if it says budget, I want it to be. Bright green. . Let's add another rule. And what if it contains right? If it contains right, let's color it orange. But if you notice, this right is not colored. Let's click done. It's because conditional format rules and this coloring goes from top to bottom. So if I click and drag this orange one to the top, Suddenly, , this task is orange because it is first going to look at right, then report, then budget so
we can click just where these dots are on the left and move these around if we want report first, or maybe we want budget first, we can move them around. And it'll go in the order that they are on the right side. Add more rules. But if you want them to act first, move them to the top. That's an interesting trick to color coding Google sheets and using conditional formatting . If you have any more questions or concerns or interesting issues, and you want to color code differently, comment down below and make sure you subscribe here to better sheets on YouTube.