I’ve already mentioned that I use excel to manage task lists from time to time. Sometimes reality catches up and a task is invalid before you get to it. You could obviously remove the task from the list, but I prefer to keep a reference of the task and why it became invalid. Instead I set the value of my status column to “Cancelled”. (Other possible values are: “Not started”, “Ongoing”, and “Done”.)

Now in case a task gets cancelled I want to apply a strikeout effect to the entire row, not just that one cell. This is not to difficult to establish, but I always forget about one of the details and need to look up an old copy. Hence I’m writing this post “for future reference”, hopefully somebody else out there finds it useful.

Have a task list at hand and select the rows in it:

Office 2010 Ribbon > Home tab > Conditional formatting > new rule

Select “Use a formula to determine which cells to format”

The formula syntax needs to be along the lines of:

=$e2="Cancelled"

Click the “format” button and check the “strikeout” effect:

The end result:

Now go ahead and try to make a rule that sets a green background for tasks where the status is set to done:

Things that usually go wrong (it’s in the details):

• Typing the wrong cell number; you need the row number of the first row in the area you selected
• Forgetting about one of the equal sings or the quotes
• Not specifying the formatting to apply
• Incorrectly selecting the area the formatting needs to apply to

• the first one contains the actual actions items
• the second one contains some lists to be used in drop down boxes in the previous sheet

When setting up data validation you cannot simply refer to a range (e.g. “List!$A$2:$A$4") on another sheet. You will get an error saying:

You may not use references to other worksheets for data validation criteria.

A workaround consists in defining a Name as MrExcel explains. Go to the second sheet, highlight your list and give it a name with Formulas > Define Name. Make sure you set the scope to workbook rather than sheet!

Now you can refer to the name you just defined in the the Data Validation dialog.

This solution works very fine for lists of a fixed length (e.g. priorities). Things get a little less pretty if your list doesn’t have a fixed length (e.g. the people possibly assigned to a particular task):

• you can change the definition of your name every time something gets added/removed to/from your list
• you can set a range that is too big, resulting in a number of empty entries in the drop down
• you can use a dynamic range. This is definitely the best solution.

The offset function used for easy cut’n'paste.

   1: =OFFSET(List!$B$1;1;0;COUNTA(List!$B:$B)-1;1)

The drop down will now expand nicely every time you add value to your list.

I learned about dynamic ranges in Excel here (Thx sak1n1 for sending me that link!)