Conditional Formatting: Highlighting Cells Containing Specific Text

Have you ever tried highlighting cells from your excel worksheet which contains specific text? You might have tried this method manually. It means you might have searched the specific text which you want to highlight in entire worksheet and then you might have applied specific color of your own choice to all those cells which has the specific text.

But this manual process is very tedious and time consuming. You have to search each and every entry with specific text and then highlight each valid entry. If you were working on a huge data then it may take hours to complete this task manually.

Conditional Formatting is an excellent feature available in excel. With the help of Conditional Formatting we can highlight cells which contains the specific text within seconds.

Let us take an example with real time data. We have listed marks of 10 students with grades obtained by them.

If you want to highlight the cells manually which are having Grades “B” then you have to check each entry one by one and highlight the cells which are having value “B” in grades column. 

But instead of doing this manually we will work smartly and we will use “Conditional Formatting”. Let us follow below steps:

1. Select the cells from which we want to highlight the specific text. It means here we will select the column “Grades” from want to highlight cells with value “B”.

2. Go to Home Tab, then select “Conditional Formatting” command which is available “Styles” group. Under Conditional Formatting select “Highlight Cells Rules” and after that select “Text That Contains”. Below image will give you clear idea on this.

3. “Text That Contains” dialog box will now appear on your screen.

4. Enter the desired text based on which we want to highlight the cells. In this case we have to enter text “B”. Next select formatting style of your own choice. The style which we have selected here is “Green Fill with Dark Green Text”.

5. Now we can see that the cells which are having Grade “B” are now highlighted with “Green Fill with Dark Green Text”.

Let’s take another example of highlighting cells with Grade “C” with different formatting style. We have to follow all the similar steps as listed above. The change is only in step no 4 where we have to enter text “C” and select formatting style as “Yellow Fill with Dark Yellow Text”. The cells which have text “C” will now be highlighted with formatting style “Yellow Fill with Dark Yellow Text”.

Similarly you can try with different text and different formatting styles in your data and if you are facing any difficulties then write to us in comment section.