Conditional formatting on Excel 2008

Howdy.

If I am not mistaken, Excel 2007 has much higher conditional formatting. My understanding is that 2008 had the same capability.

See if this helps: Conditional Formatting

 

After further searching, I see that Excel 2008 does not have the additional capabilities.

However, there is a hint here on how to extend: Excel 2008 Conditional Formatting

 

When I was working as an analyst for a Fortune 100 company, I had developed VBA to allow any number of conditions; based on a table on a separate worksheet that was hidden. It was instantaneous. Too bad VBA isn't available for 2008.

You might consider using AppleScript or Python to achieve the same results.

 

Which means if you want to do it, then Python would be the way to go, since it works on Windows and Mac.

 

You should be able to set up a helper column in which numbers are in column A and the words in column B.

 

Getting back to the original question about conditional formatting, Excel 2007 is simply fabulous. It can do all you ask and more, including graduated colors based on their values, the ability to filter by color and sort by color.

Excel 2008 is more like the old Excel 2003 and is appallingly slow just to make it worse, even after the recent SP2 update.

I run Excel 2007 under Windows XP under VMware Fusion on my MBP (2.4 GHz with 4GB RAM) and I'm very, very happy with how it all works.

Even under Fusion, Excel 2007 loads a largish workbook in 30 seconds that takes 12 minutes under 2008, and calculations run 3.5 times faster with 2007.

But I would not try this without the 4GBs of RAM.

 

Let me grab some code at work tomorrow. I remember setting up a heatmap in excel with some conditional formatting that produced a different RGB code for different criteria. Ill keep you posted.