How to Make Colors Change With Validation in Excel. Excel's conditional formatting tool applies formatting depending on cells' contents. Validation rules can change cells font, style, size or border.

As mentioned in the intro, you can use conditional formatting to make certain values stand out with colored text and backgrounds. You can, for example, indicate problem data values in red, and ...

When you think VBA code is your only hope, try combing built-it conditional formatting tools. You might just find an easier solution than writing code.

Learn how to add a highlight to expose groups in your Microsoft Excel data using a helper column and Excel’s conditional formatting feature.