Quickly Select Cells Based on Formatting in Excel 2007/2010

Sometimes you may need to select cells based on formatting of other cells in Excel. Once the cells are selected, you can modify them as a group. For example, you can apply different formatting to the selected cells.

Excel’s built-in command only enables you to select the cells which are completely in the same format with the base cell, while the Kutools for Excel’s Select Cells with Format brings more options than the Excel command. With it, you can:

• Quickly selects cells with the same formatting from a range cells according to the formatting of the base cell or the base cell attributes;
• Specify the base cell attributes that will be used to select cells. Demo

Usage:

1.Before using the Select Cells by Format utility, select the range you want to work with, and hold down “Ctrl” key to additionally select the base cell which contains formatting attributes that you want to use for selecting cells;

2.   Click Kutools >> Select Tools >> Select Cell with Format. See screenshots (Fig.1 and Fig.2).

Fig.1 Select Cells with Format		Fig.2 Select Cells with Format dialog box

3. If necessary, change the settings of Range or the Base Cell by inputting the range or clicking the button to reselect them by mouse dragging.

4. You may see that all the formatting attributes of the base cell are displayed in checkboxes. Place a checkmark to the formatting attributes you want to match. See screenshot (Fig. 4)

5. Click OK, and you can get a summary with the number of selected range.

6. All the matched cells are successfully selected. See screenshot (Fig. 5)

Let us look at the following example.

Fig. 3 - example: before selecting cells by formatting

Fig. 4 – example: choose the criteria of the base cell that you want to match

Fig. 5 – example: after selecting cells by formatting.

Notes:

If you change the base cell (using the Base Cell range selector), the checkboxes will display information for the new base cell.

To avoid selecting blank cells, choose “Don't select empty cells”.

If you would like to see a summary of the number of cells selected, choose Display summary.

See Select Cells with Format feature demo (video 1)

This is only one feature of Kutools for Excel

It includes more than 100 functions and tools for Excel 2007 and 2010.