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How to highlight cells based on length of text in Excel?

Supposing you are working with a worksheet which has list of text strings, and now, you want to highlight all the cells that the length of the text is greater than 15. This artical, I will talk about some methods for solving this task in Excel.

Highlight cells based on length of text with Conditional Formatting

Select and shade cells based on length of text with a powerful feature


Select and shade cells based on length of text (greather than, less than, between two specific values) in Excel

Kutools for Excel's Super Find feature supports to find all specific cells based on text, value, dates and cell formattings as you need. After selecting the cells, you can format, copy or delete them as you need. Click to download Kutools for Excel!

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Highlight cells based on length of text with Conditional Formatting

With a simple LEN function in Conditional Formatting feature, you can quickly highlight the cells which text length in a certain characters.

1. Select the data range that you want to highlight the cells.

2. Click Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule, see screenshot:

3. In the New Formatting Rule dialog, click Use a formula to determine which cells to format option, and then enter this formula =LEN(A2)>15 into the Format values where this formula is true text box, see screenshot:

Note: In the above formula, A2 is the first cell which contains the value, and >15 is the criteria that you want to highlight cells based on, in this case the text length is greater than 15 characters, you can change them as you need.

4. Then click Format button, and in the Format Cells dialog, choose one color you like under Fill tab, see screenshot:

5. Then click OK > OK to close the dialogs, and all the cells which character length is greater than 15 are highlighted with your selected color at once.

Note: The Conditional Formatting tool is a dynamic function, if you change the length of the text string, the color will be adjusted automatically as well.


Select and shade cells based on length of text with a powerful feature

If you have Kutools for Excel, with its Super Find function, you can quickly select the cells based on various criteria as you need.

Tips:To apply this Super Find feature, firstly, you should download the Kutools for Excel, and then apply the feature quickly and easily.

After installing Kutools for Excel, please do as this:

1. Select the data range that you want to use, and then click Kutools > Find > Super Find, see screenshot:

2. In the opened Super Find pane, please do with the following operations:

3. After finishing the settings, click Select button, and all the cells meet the criteria you created have been selected, then you can format the selected cell as you need.

Download and free trial Kutools for Excel Now!


More relative articles:

  • Highlight / conditional formatting cells with formulas in Excel
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  • Highlight Duplicate Values In Different Colors In Excel
  • In Excel, we can easily highlight the duplicate values in a column with one color by using the Conditional Formatting, but, sometimes, we need to highlight the duplicate values in different colors to recognize the duplicates quickly and easily as following screenshot shown. How could you solve this task in Excel?
  • Highlight Rows Based On Drop Down List In Excel
  • This article will talk about how to highlight rows based on drop down list, take the following screenshot for example, when I select “In Progress” from the drop down list in column E, I need to highlight this row with red color, when I select “Completed” from the drop down list, I need to highlight this row with blue color, and when I select “Not Started”, a green color will be used to highlight the row.
  • Highlight The Cells Linked By Hyperlinks In Excel
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  • Auto-Highlight Row And Column Of Active Cell In Excel
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Comments (7)
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This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
Hello , i need some help please. Is there a way to configurate a Cell to highlight after the 41st character? i would be able to write more than 40 characters...but there would be a highlight in the remaining text... Thanks for your help!
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
Hello , can someone help me , please ? I need to configurate a Cell in a way that if it has more than 40 characters , it would highlight starting on the 41st character ...:) any idea how? thank you!
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
Hi,

Please can you help me in highlighting the first 6 characters in the cell.

eg: In the below list, I would like to highlight ABC123, ABC234, ABC345

ABC123-a80en
ABC234-a80en
ABC345-x80en
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
In the Dutch version of Office, LEN did not work, but LENGTE (Dutch for length) dit the trick...

Something similar might be the case for other languages as well.
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
I tried to use the conditional formatting formula to highlight cells based on length of text, but am not getting the desired results. Here is my scenario: I have a spreadsheet and in one column, every entry consists of 5 "characters". Some of the entries contain 5 letters and some contain 4 letters with a "blank" space at the end. This blank space is being counted as a character. I'm trying to format to highlight all entries with 4 letters and a blank space. Is this possible? Thank you in advance.
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
you can use len(trim(cell containg value)) this will give you the exact count of characters in a cell then you can format the cell you see with different amount of characters.
This comment was minimized by the moderator on the site
you'll need to strip the string of its 'padding' spaces. Try a formula like =Len(Trim(A1))<>4
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