Conditionally Highlighting a Milestone Cell

Steve has a worksheet that he uses to track his walking steps and distance. He has daily totals and a cumulative column. Using a conditional formatting rule, Steve would like to highlight "milestone" cells—for instance, when the cumulative total reaches or exceeds 100,000 steps. He wonders how to pinpoint that the target has been reached and highlight just the single cell, not all the cells that follow the milestone.

In setting up your conditional formatting rule, you'll need to do so using a formula. First, select all the cells in your cumulative column to which you want the conditional format applied. (In my case, I selected cells in column B, starting with cell B2, which I assume is where the cumulative values are.) Then, create a conditional formatting rule that uses any of the following formulas:

=B2=MIN(FILTER(B:B,B:B>=100000))
=B2=MINIFS(B:B,B:B,">=100000")
=AND(B2>=100000,B1<100000)
=IF(B1<100000,IF(B2>=100000,TRUE,FALSE),FALSE)
=COUNTIF($B$2:B2,">=100000")=1

Which should you choose? It doesn't really matter; they all do essentially the same thing—to return True if the threshold is met. The key is to make sure you select the range to which it should be applied and modify the formulas to reflect the selected cell in the range (B2 in all of these).

These formulas will highlight only the first cell after the threshold (100,000). If you want to, instead, highlight the cells after each threshold crossing (100,000, 200,000, 300,000, etc.), then you should use a different formula. Any of the following will work just fine:

=FLOOR(B2,100000)<>FLOOR(B1,100000)
=(MOD(B2,100000)-MOD(B1,100000))<=0
=MOD(B2,100000)
Remember to change the formatting in your conditional formatting rule to reflect how you want the appropriate value (the one after the threshold) to be highlighted.


                

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11470) applies to Microsoft Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Excel in Microsoft 365.