In our case it is all of the phone numbers on the “Current” worksheet.

Now that we've looked at how the formula works, let's see how the conditional formatting is applied.įirst select the entire range of cells that you want the formatting applied to. That's because when we apply the conditional formatting to our entire table, Excel will examine each cell individually to see if the criteria apply, but only if it's expressed as a relative reference (no dollar symbols in the reference). It's important that the B2 used for the criteria argument is expressed as a relative reference, not an absolute reference. With conditional formatting, we use those numbers to highlight the entries that are duplicates.įor our example, the formula looks like this: =COUNTIF(Historical!$B$2:$F$1001,B2) If it is NOT found on that sheet, it will return a zero. If the value that is found in cell B2 is also found in our designated range on the Historical tab, the COUNTIF function will return a number greater than zero. The criteria argument is simply the value that we are looking for. In my video tutorial, my range is from B2 to F1001 on the “Historical” sheet.

Range is the group of cells that you want to look in to find a specific value. The first is range and the second is criteria. For this process we are using the COUNTIF function.ĬOUNTIF has two arguments. If so, it will return a value of the number of times that data is found. The formula we'll write is going to examine a cell to see if its contents can be found in another range that we specify. Click to enlargeįirst let's look at how to write the formula and then we will see how to apply the conditional formatting. You can do so using a formula and conditional formatting. Let's say you have two Excel worksheets that have overlapping data and you want to call attention to any cells that have duplicate entries. Compare-Sheets-with-Conditional-Formatting-AFTER.xlsx Highlighting Duplicates Between Worksheets

Excel 365 spreadsheet compare