Editing Cell Presentation

Highlighting Patterns With Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting changes how cells look based on their values — turning a wall of numbers into something you can scan at a glance. Copilot can either suggest formatting that fits your table or apply rules you describe in plain language.

Getting Formatting Suggestions

To see what Copilot recommends for your table:

1. Select the table;
2. Right-click to open the context menu;
3. Choose Copilot Suggestions;
4. Select Suggest Conditional Formatting.

Copilot returns a list of formatting ideas — colour scales, data bars, icon sets, or category colour-coding. To apply one, type its number into Copilot chat.

The Three Main Formatting Types

The suggestions usually fall into three categories, and each fits a different kind of data:

• Colour gradients (scales) — best for continuous numeric data where you want to see the overall distribution, like a heatmap;
• Data bars — best for comparing magnitudes row by row, almost like an inline bar chart;
• Colour-coded categories or icon sets — best for discrete groups or threshold-based status, like flagging deals as red/yellow/green.

Picking the right type matters more than picking a colour. The wrong type can hide the pattern you're trying to show.

Why It Matters Beyond Decoration

Conditional formatting isn't cosmetic. It changes what you notice when you look at the table:

• Outliers become visible immediately, instead of being hidden inside long lists of numbers;
• Trends across rows or columns become obvious from the shape of the colours;
• Groups and categories become scannable without reading each row.

The goal is to make the data answer questions at a glance, before you've even started analysing it.

Custom Formatting From A Prompt

When Copilot's suggestions don't match what you want to emphasise, describe the rule yourself. A clear natural-language prompt — colour-coding by category, by range, by threshold, or by any condition — and Excel applies the formatting automatically.

Useful when the insight you want to highlight is specific to your data and not something Copilot would have proposed on its own.