Apply Conditional Formatting to an Entire Column in Excel

If you want to apply conditional formatting to an Entire Column, select the entire column or the row before you open the conditional formatting option to apply. This tutorial will look at a quick way to do this. Let’s get started.

In the example below, we have an amount in column A, and you need to apply the conditional formatting to the entire column A which highlights all the numbers greater than 1500.

Steps to Apply Conditional Formatting to an Entire Column

1. First and foremost, select the entire column with the keyboard shortcut (Ctrl + Space) or click on the column header.
   
2. Afterward, go to the Home Tab > Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cells Rule > Greater than.
   
3. Now in the greater than dialog box, enter 1500 in the “Format Cells which are greater than”, input box and select the format you want to apply to the cells with the value above 1500.
   
4. Finally, click OK to apply the formatting to the entire column.
   

Now here, conditional formatting is applied to the entire column, and when you enter a new value in the end, it also checks whether the condition is that the value is greater than 1500 or not.

Using a Table Instead of an Entire Column

There’s no problem when you apply conditional formatting to an entire column, but if you use Excel Table (Ctrl + T to apply), you can make it dynamic. It will extend the conditional formatting once you enter a new value.

In the above example, conditional formatting only applies to the range A1:A100. However, as we have applied the Excel Table to the data when you enter a new value to extend the data range, it also extends the conditional formatting along with it as well.

Both methods work great; you can choose which suits your requirement.

Apply Conditional Formatting to the Entire Row

 If you want to apply conditional formatting to the entire row, you can use the same steps we used in the above example.

All the steps are the same; you need to select the entire row first and then apply conditional formatting to it. And to select an entire row, click on the row header or use the keyboard shortcut Shift + Space.