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Worksheet design and formatting

View a list of articles and webinars produced by the Excel Community on worksheet design and formatting.

Displaying 1-20 of 262 results
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Condition formatting - beyond icons
  • Article
  • 17 Nov 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Having covered some of the advanced options available for working with conditional formatting Icon Sets in previous posts, this time we will look at the advanced options available for the other graphical conditional formats: Data Bars and Colour Scales.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Dealing with complex conditional formatting rules simply
  • Article
  • 10 Nov 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Last time, we continued our exploration of some of the advanced options available for working with Conditional Formatting Icon Sets.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Making conditional formatting more interactive and more automatic
  • Article
  • 27 Oct 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Last time, we delved into the advanced options available for working with Conditional Formatting Icon Sets. This time we will make use of the extra flexibility that putting the value in a cell allows us, and use an Excel Spin Button to set the value more easily. We will then explore the use of a formula to calculate the threshold value automatically.
Liam Bastick
Exclusive Running totals in filtered tables
  • Article
  • 27 Oct 2025
  • Liam Bastick
In this article, Liam Bastick considers the problem of ensuring running totals still work, whether an Excel table is filtered or not.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Controlling your icons with conditional formatting
  • Article
  • 14 Oct 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Last time, we looked at one way of automatically highlighting certain cells in a PivotTable using conditional formatting. There are several different ways of using conditional formatting to apply highlights, with Colour Scales and Icon Sets being perhaps the most obvious. These two graphical conditional formats are included in the Conditional Formatting dropdown and can easily be applied with a mouse click or two. However, sometimes using too many colours and too many different icons can have the opposite effect to that intended, obscuring the information rather than drawing attention to the k...
meeting on laptop
Excel Lunch and Learn series: Discovering the underappreciated gems within the Excel Ribbons
  • Webinar
  • 03 Sep 2025
  • ICAEW Excel Community
Think you know the Excel ribbons? Think again. In this lunch and learn series, John Tennent, will take you on a guided tour of the lesser known but incredibly useful features and functionality tucked away in the Excel ribbons.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Seeing stars – managing relationships with Power BI
  • Article
  • 13 Aug 2025
  • Simon Hurst
In our short series on Power BI and conditional formatting we have so far added a star to highlight our 500th Tips and Tricks article and then created a table to identify key articles for our on-demand course modules so that we can add a star to each of those articles too. This has given us the opportunity to look at data structures and joins between tables as well as conditional formatting itself. This time we will investigate the table joins in a bit more detail.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Reach for the stars – joining the club
  • Article
  • 08 Jul 2025
  • Simon Hurst
Following on from using conditional formatting in a Power BI report to highlight our 500th tips and tricks article, this time we are looking at adding stars to our on-demand courses resource page to highlight the most relevant posts for each of our 6 modules. As part of allocating stars to articles, we will look at different ways of relating tables to each other in a relational database.
Headshot of Mark Proctor
Exclusive Reduce spreadsheet maintenance with a dynamic total row
  • Article
  • 02 Jul 2025
  • Mark Proctor
When data changes, it is common to update formulas to accommodate the size of the data. However, less maintenance we need to do, the more efficient we can be. So, in this article we look at how to stop updating total rows by having them move position automatically.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Power BI – I’m going to make you a star
  • Article
  • 05 Jun 2025
  • Simon Hurst
The 500th article in the Excel Tips and Tricks series has just been published. As one way of celebrating the milestone, we have added a gold star to the article in the list of articles displayed in the community archive portal using conditional formatting in Power BI.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Excel, what’s occurrin’ 8 – Data Validation
  • Article
  • 23 Apr 2025
  • Simon Hurst
This series looks at some of the things that can go wrong in an Excel spreadsheet and at what we can do to avoid or resolve the issue. The first six parts dealt with issues that cause numbers to appear not to add up correctly. This time, we move on from conditional formatting to look at Data Validation.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Excel, what’s occurrin’ 7 – Conditional formatting from bottom to top
  • Article
  • 08 Apr 2025
  • Simon Hurst
This series looks at some of the things that can go wrong in an Excel spreadsheet and at what we can do to avoid or resolve the issue. This first six parts dealt with issues that cause numbers to appear not to add up correctly. This time, we move on from number formatting to conditional formatting. We’ll look at applying multiple conditional formats to the same cell or range of cells and see why you might use a conditional format with no format.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Excel, what’s occurrin’ 6 – Towards Zero
  • Article
  • 25 Mar 2025
  • Simon Hurst
This series looks at some of the things that can go wrong in an Excel spreadsheet and at what we can do to avoid or resolve the issue. This time we conclude our exploration of dodgy numbers with a look at number formats and zeros.
data on tablet
Exclusive Excel Lunch and Learn series: Visualisation with Excel
  • Webinar
  • 09 Jan 2025
  • ICAEW Excel Community
Transform raw data into insightful visualisations and easy-to-read reporting with our lunch and learn series of five 30 minute webinars, presented by John Tennent, Corporate Edge.
Headshot of Bani Lamba
Exclusive Your 2025 Excel Community Guide
  • Article
  • 11 Dec 2024
  • Bani Lamba
As we step into a new year, we’re delighted to welcome all our members to the growing Excel Community. With over 1,000 articles, over 490 tips, 4 thought leadership guides and an extensive archive of webinar recordings, we realise that it can sometimes be tricky to find what you’re looking for. So, here is a guide that you can use as a starting point to make the best use of your community.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Ticks, crosses and noughts
  • Article
  • 05 Nov 2024
  • Simon Hurst
Experimenting with an Excel tip in a recent LinkedIn post leads to an exploration of the use of conditional formatting for adding ticks and crosses to Excel cells, and the discovery of a surprising comparison capability.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive Multiple conditional formats
  • Article
  • 18 Oct 2024
  • Simon Hurst
It is possible to apply multiple conditional formats to the same cell or range of cells. Where rule formats don’t clash with other rules, then all the rules that satisfy the condition will be applied. However, where rules are mutually exclusive, for example where they both change the font colour, rules are evaluated in a specific order of priority. In this article we look at making sure that your rules are in the right order.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE TABLES Simple but effective tables, part 6
  • Article
  • 03 Jul 2024
  • Simon Hurst
In this series we are going to examine some of the capabilities of Excel Tables. We will be concentrating on the practical use of Tables to improve spreadsheet productivity. The last article finished with a brief introduction to the use of Slicers as interactive filters for Excel Tables. This time we show how Slicers can be used in practice to create an interactive dashboard from an Excel Table.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE TABLES Simple but effective tables, part 5
  • Article
  • 24 Jun 2024
  • Simon Hurst
In this series we are going to examine some of the capabilities of Excel Tables. We will be concentrating on the practical use of Tables to improve spreadsheet productivity. As part of our journey through the capabilities of Tables, this time we are going to examine some of the options available in the contextual Table Design Ribbon tab.
Simon Hurst
Exclusive General Election 2024
  • Article
  • 24 Jun 2024
  • Simon Hurst
General Election 2024 – why the numbers are wrong
Displaying 1-20 of 262 results

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