This post demonstrates how to highlight/color negative values in excel.
By highlighting negative values in color we enable those values to draw the eyes quickly , because sometimes we are rather more concerned with things that are not going well(in case of profit comparison from last year as shown in the pic below).
In the pic above, we are doing month wise comparison of 2016 profits with 2015 profits, and as you could see the negative values are highlighted/colored in order to grab our attention quickly.
We could highlight/color the negative values in excel with the help of conditional formatting in a couple of simple steps.
Step 1
Select the data that you want to be highlighted in case of negative values and got to
Conditional Formatting->Highlight Cell Rules->Less Than in the Home tab as shown in the screenshot below
Step 2
As soon as you click the Less Than, its window open and you could enter 0(as we want to highlight/color negative values) in the formula box as shown in the figure.
As can be seen, we are seeing the negative values in red .We could highlight/color the positive values in the same way just by selecting Greater Than instead of selecting less Than.
Hope this helped.