You can add this rule before or after adding other rules. Remember that there’s no condition as to when you should add the rule to skip the blank cells. Setup Conditional Formatting for Blank Cells to Highlight Them Click ‘Apply’ so that all the conditional formatting rules will skip blank cells within the column you have selected. Then, to move it, just select the rule and use the arrow buttons to move it to the very top. If you have other formatting conditions, make sure the one that you have created appears for blank cells at the top of the list. Then, you can add additional formatting conditions as you please. The new rule for conditional formatting which you have added will now be listed here. Then, you will return to the Rule Manager window. Once you have selected ‘Blanks’ click on OK. This is under the ‘Format only cells with’ that contains a drop-down list. If you want to skip conditional formatting for blank cells, select ‘Format only cells that contain’ and select ‘Blank’ under the Edit the Rule Description. Here, you will see different rule types, which you can customize. A new window will open, which contains New Formatting Rule. We do this by first selecting the column, then go to Conditional Formatting under the Home tab in the Ribbon. In the example below, we have applied conditional formatting to the C column so that all values less than 1,000 will be highlighted in red. How to Skip Conditional Formatting for Blank Cellsįirst, you have to pull up the Excel file where you have applied the conditional formatting, or the file where you intend to apply the conditional formatting to.

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