Conditional Formatting: Highlighting Entire Row in Excel

In this blog post we will learn how to highlight entire row with the help of Conditional Formatting in excel.

For this we have prepared a dummy data of 04 team members working on different tasks. We have also provided status for each task whether it is “Open” or “Closed”. We will now learn how we can highlight the entire row based on the provided status. We will highlight the entire row in green color if the status is “Closed”.

Let’s follow the below steps and you will be able to highlight the entire row based on our specific criteria.

1. Select all the cells in which we wish to highlight the entire row based on specific criteria.

Please Note: While selecting the cells we must exclude the header row.

2. Now, we have to click on the “Conditional Formatting” option which we can find in Styles Group under Home Tab as shown in below image.

3. Once we click on the “Conditional Formatting” option, we can see the further options will appear on our screen. We have to Click on “New Rule” out of these appeared options.

4. This will open “New Formatting Rule” dialog box on our screen. We can see multiple rules in this dialog box. We have to select the rule “Use a formula to determine which cells to format” as shown in below image.

5. After this we have to specify our criteria and formatting style in the area highlighted in red in below image.

6. Under the section “Format values where this formula is true” we can specify our criteria. In this case we have mentioned our criteria as “=$E2=”Closed”.

Note: $ symbol defines the cell address as Mixed Referencing Style. Click here to read more on this. 

7. Now, we have to specify the formatting style. Click on the “Format” button as highlighted in below image.

8. This will open “Format Cells” dialog box. We can select formatting style of our own choice from here. We have selected “Green” color under “Fill” tab. Click on “OK” button once we select the formatting style.

9. Once we click on “OK” button we can see that “New Formatting Style” dialog box will again appear on screen. Here we can see the preview of our selected formatting style as highlighted in below image.

10. Again click on “OK” button and we can see that the entire row for which status is “Closed” is now highlighted with green background color.

In this way you can highlight entire row with the help of “Conditional Formatting” in excel.