How do i highlight a cell to be red/green based on the 2 date columns I have?

yheng

I have about 10 columns of different Plan and Actual due dates . I am trying to get the the Actual Column date to highlight in green when it is before or equivalent to the Planned date. How do I do this? in the conditional formatting i'm limited based on the calendar, when it's actually based on the input for the planned date. Example below

Matt Johnson

Hi @yheng

You could achieve this by adding a column that subtracts Actual from the Plan dates and then doing the conditional formatting off the added column.

yheng

Hi, thanks Matt! I was hoping I could achieve this without needing to add an additional column. My workaround is similar in concept to yours. I added the Status column with the formula and used conditional formatting based on the RGB ball

Matt Johnson

@yheng

Im not a big fan of adding columns either but I'm usually not pushing the column count limit so lately I've been adding columns for this kind of thing and then hiding the column and totally forgetting about it. Its basically behind the scenes automation to me.

yheng

Makes sense. thanks so much for your help. Your method is definitely more succinct than mine.