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Demo: Use conditional formatting to highlight operations deficiencies and opportunities

Applies to: Microsoft Office Excel 2003

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Do you ever wish an alarm would go off when your team strays too far away from its goals? Conditional formatting in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 can help. No need for everyone to wade through pages of analysis — if it’s flagged in red, it’s a problem and needs attention.

Note For screen reader text detailing the content of the video and a screen reader version of the audio script, click Demo text version.

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Screen Action	Audio Script
An Excel 2003 worksheet is open and a Microsoft PivotTable® report displays a company’s warehouse inventory by city.	To keep my team focused on key priorities and meet my company’s business needs, I have to be able to quickly identify performance areas that need improvement.
The pointer highlights the data in the units_shipped column and then, on the Format menu, selects Conditional Formatting. The Conditional Formatting dialog box opens.	For example, every one of our warehouses needs to ship a minimum of 50,000 units a month. I can quickly identify the warehouses that aren’t meeting this goal by adding conditional formatting to our status report.
The pointer chooses conditional options from the list boxes so that the condition reads Cell Value Is less than 50,000. The pointer then clicks the Format button and chooses Bold for the font style and Red for the color.	I’m going to highlight the shipments that are less than 50,000 units in red.
The pointer clicks OK and the dialog boxes close. The scene changes back to the worksheet, and all the numbers in the units_shipped column that are less than 50,000 are shown in bold red type.	The color coding makes it easy to scan the report and identify the warehouses that are under-performing.
The pointer opens the File menu and chooses Save as Web Page. In the Save As dialog box, the pointer clicks the Selection: Sheet option button and then clicks Publish.	I’ll go ahead and publish this report to our Web site so the rest of the team can see it, too.
In the Publish as Web Page dialog box, the pointer selects the PivotTable chart in the Choose field, and then clicks Publish.	In this case, I’ll only publish the PivotTable chart.
The scene changes to display only the selected PivotTable chart in a Web browser. The scene changes again to the Excel worksheet, showing the source of the published data. The animated text Experience your own great moments appears. Under it appears the URL http://www.microsoft.com/office.	Now, anyone from my team or management can see how we’re doing in each warehouse. Excel 2003 made it easy for me to quickly highlight our problem areas and distribute that information to the rest of my team. Now that we know where the problems are, we can work on solving them.