Conditional formatting is an incredibly versatile feature in Google Sheets, offering users the ability to dynamically apply formatting to their data based on specific criteria. One particularly effective approach involves leveraging the power of the VLOOKUP function, which enables you to fetch information from another sheet or range and utilize the retrieved values to dictate formatting rules.
This article aims to provide a comprehensive guide for beginners on utilizing VLOOKUP results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets, supplemented with a practical scenario to enhance comprehension.
By utilizing VLOOKUP in conjunction with conditional formatting, you can effortlessly highlight relevant data, emphasize specific trends, or draw attention to important insights within your spreadsheet. This method proves especially useful when you have large datasets or when you need to reference information from different areas of your spreadsheet.
In this Google Sheets tutorial, we will guide beginners through the process of using VLOOKUP results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets. Not just that, we will also illustrate the concept with a scenario to make it easier to understand.
Use Case/Scenario: Tracking Student Grades
Let’s imagine you are a teacher and want to track your students’ grades. You have two sheets in your Google Sheets document: the “Grades” sheet, where you input the students’ scores, and the “Summary” sheet, where you want to apply conditional formatting to highlight students who scored above a certain threshold.
To simplify your job, you can leverage Vlookup results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets.
While using Vlookup results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets can be a little tricky, today’s guide will simplify the entire process.
After reviewing the example we have put together, you should know how to use Vlookup results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets.
But don’t just take our word for it. Check out our examples for better insights.
A practical example of using Vlookup results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets
Having highlighted a use case/scenario to use Vlookup results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets, it’s time we go over an example together.
To ensure you extensively understand how to use Vlookup results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets, we intend to keep our example very simple.
For this example, we will create two sheets. We will name the first sheet, Grades and the second sheet Summary. The Grades sheet will feature the students’ names in column A and their corresponding scores in column B.
Our Summary Sheet will look slightly the same, albeit with some changes. While the Summary Sheets will have the Students name in Column A, we will leave the column for scores blank.
Given our description above, here is what our sample sheets will look like:
Now that we have our sample data ready, it’s time to jump straight into the practical aspect of this guide. Here is how to go about it.
Step 1: Define the threshold
To be able to use Vlookup results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets, the first thing we need to do is define the threshold.
By defining the threshold, we are basically stating which student’s score should be highlighted in the summary sheet. For this example, we will use 80 as our threshold.
Step 2: Apply conditional formatting
After defining the threshold, which is a walk in the park. We need to take things up a notch. Here is where things get somewhat tricky, so pay keen attention.
For this step, we need to select the range of cells in the “Summary Sheet where we would want the conditional formatting to be applied. So head over to that sheet and select the cells to which you want to apply conditional formatting.
With our range of cells selected, navigate to the Format menu and select the option for Conditional formatting. The image below shows you exactly how to go about that.
After selecting the option for conditional formatting, Google Sheets will automatically launch the conditional formatting rules window to the extreme right of your spreadsheet.
If you did everything exactly as we have shown you above, you should see something like this:
Step 3: Tweak conditional formatting rules
With the conditional formatting rules window launched to the extreme right of our spreadsheet, we need to tweak the rules to reflect exactly what we want. To do that, we need to click on the dropdown button on the “Format cells if” menu and select the option “Greater than.”
And since our threshold is 80, we will go ahead and enter 80 in the field for value or formula and click on “Done.”
The video below shows you exactly how to do that.
Step 4: Type in your Vlookup formula
Now that we have set the parameters for our conditional formatting, it’s time to enter our Vlookup formula.
Here is the Vlookup formula we will use for this example.
=VLOOKUP(A2, Grades!A:B, 2, FALSE)
To input our formula, we must choose the cell where we want our result generated. For this example, we will use cell B2 in our Summary Sheet.
With the cell where we want to generate our result selected, head over to the formula bar and type in the following formula:
=VLOOKUP(A2, Grades!A:B, 2, FALSE)
Step 5: Hit Enter
After typing our VLOOKUP formula, all we need to do is hit the Enter button on our keyboard. If you did everything correctly, Google Sheets should automatically generate the result in the selected cell, according to our conditional formatting rules.
Here is what ours looks like:
Looking closely at the image above, you’ll notice we only generated the result for a single cell. To use Vlookup results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets to generate the results for other cells, all we need to do is use Google Sheets auto-fill option. This saves us the stress of repeating the entire steps manually.
The video below gives a better picture of how to use the Google Sheets auto-fill option. Check it out for yourself.
After applying Google Sheets auto-fill option, here is what our sheet now looks like:
From the image above, you can clearly see that we were able to use VLOOKUP results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets. Using VLOOKUP with conditional formatting, we were able to format our sheet to reflect students who scored above 80.
A close look at the image above shows that students like Alyssa, Lawrence, Gerald, Christopher and Aaron scored above the threshold of 80. To this end, their scores are highlighted according to our conditional formatting rules. For other students who scored below that, their scores remained unformatted
Now, that’s how to use VLOOKUP results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets. That wasn’t too hard, was it?
Final Thoughts
In the realm of tracking student grades, Google Sheets offers a powerful feature known as conditional formatting. By combining this feature with the VLOOKUP function, teachers can effortlessly identify outstanding performers and gain valuable insights from their data.
This comprehensive scenario has demonstrated how to set up a “Grades” sheet, define a threshold for exceptional performance, and apply conditional formatting in the “Summary” sheet. As a result, teachers can quickly and visually pinpoint students who have exceeded expectations.
Beyond the classroom, using VLOOKUP results for conditional formatting in Google Sheets can be applied to diverse scenarios. Whether it’s monitoring sales targets, evaluating employee performance, or analyzing any dataset with specific criteria, conditional formatting becomes an indispensable tool for beginners and experienced users alike.
With Google Sheets as your ally, data analysis and visualization become accessible, empowering users to make informed decisions based on highlighted insights.
By simplifying the process of conditional formatting through the use of VLOOKUP, Google Sheets empowers educators, professionals, and enthusiasts to unlock the potential of their data and drive progress in their respective fields.