Conditional formatting

- [Instructor] In Excel, conditional formatting is an invaluable tool enabling users to explore data variations and trends with ease. Copilot streamlines this process remarkably. Access the exercise file for this video, 03_01conditional_formatting, which contains data on the 15 largest cities in the United States. Let's start with straightforward conditional formatting techniques. I'll open Copilot. Let's go to app skills. Now, there may or may not be a boilerplate card here, and you can try it if you wish. Looks like this one will highlight all cells with incomplete in red. I don't see any incomplete data here. Let's just write our own prompts, shall we? I'll come down here and let's say highlight is capital equals yes in green. So I'm going to specify the highlight color, what the value should be, and I want to try to be as specific as possible. More specific prompt means fewer surprises in output. We will get a little game plan here. I'm good with that, and I will apply those changes. Perfect. The same kind of principles apply to other formatting styles such as emboldening the three highest population density figures. And we could continue here with fills and formats and so forth. Let's look at some other conditional formatting options to enhance our data representation. For example, we can introduce blue data bars to signify population figures. Okay, so we will add that and see how that looks. So you'll see it's just a nice kind of visualization inside of our table to help us understand the relative populations. Now, as you add more of these conditional formats, you might want help kind of managing them. Let's see if Copilot can help with that. Now this is interesting. It looks like it was able to find two of these, but not all of them. So in this case, it may be better to use our own skills here. And what I might do is ask a question like, what are the ways, just ask a little more hypothetically, how would I do this, Copilot? Rather than asking Copilot to do it itself, for some reason it looks like the bold isn't considered a conditional format in this situation. And we do get some ideas with what to do here. So while asking Copilot to modify specific conditional formats or list them is somewhat unsatisfactory, we can effectively use Copilot to remove all conditional formatting from a table. Let's try that. Clear all conditional formatting and let's apply. And the conditional formatting is gone. By leveraging Excel with Copilot for conditional formatting, you can transform complex datasets into compelling visual narratives.