How To Apply Conditional Formatting Across An Entire Row in Google Sheets

In this tutorial, you will learn how to apply conditional formatting across an entire row in Google Sheets

How To Apply Conditional Formatting Across An Entire Row in Google Sheets

Conditional formatting is a powerful feature in Google Sheets that allows you to highlight cells that meet certain criteria.

You may want to use conditional formatting to highlight an entire row rather than just a single cell. For example, you may want to highlight rows that include a date equal to the current date.

In this guide, we will show you how to apply conditional formatting to an entire row in Google Sheets. We will also provide a few examples of when this can be useful.

How To Highlight an Entire Row using Conditional Formatting in Google Sheets

Here’s how to highlight an entire row using conditional formatting in Google Sheets. In this section, we will cover two sample use cases for applying conditional formatting across an entire row.

Step 1

First, highlight the range that you want to apply conditional formatting to. Every column that you want to be highlighted as part of your row should be selected.

In this example, our row spans Columns A through E.

Step 2

Next, select the Conditional formatting option under the Format drop-down menu.

Step 3

Select the option ‘Custom formula is’ to enable custom formulas.The row indicated in the formula must match the first row of your highlighted range. For example, if your data is A2:E22, then your conditional formatting rule must refer to a cell in the second row. After providing the rule, you may now specify the formatting style to apply to cells where the rule returns TRUE. Click Done to proceed.

In this example, we used the formula “$E2>1000” to check column E for amounts greater than $1000. It is necessary to add a dollar sign before the column letter E to indicate that we will only be checking that column for our conditional formatting rule.

Step 4

You should now have conditional formatting that highlights an entire row. Our example below highlights every entry that has an amount greater than $1000.

Step 5

Another common use case for applying conditional formatting across an entire row is when your table includes checkboxes. You may want to highlight the entire row if the checkbox has been selected by the user.

First, select the range that includes the entire row you want highlighted.

Step 6

Our custom formula will simply be a reference to the column with the checkbox. In this case, we’ll use the formula “=$F2”. This works because checkboxes that are marked with a check is equivalent to the value TRUE in Google Sheets.

Step 7

After applying the conditional formatting, you should now have a table where you can highlight rows by clicking on each row’s checkbox.

Summary

This guide should be everything you need to apply conditional formatting across an entire row in Google Sheets.

You may make a copy of this example spreadsheet to test it out on your own.