When do you use conditional formatting in Excel?

Excel's conditional formatting options allow you to apply different formatting options, such as background color, borders, or font formatting to data that meets certain conditions.

Overdue dates, for example, can be formatted to show up with a red background or a green font color or both.

Conditional formatting is applied to one or more cells and, when the data in those cells meet the condition or conditions specified, the chosen formats are applied.

Starting with Excel2007, Excel has a number of pre-set conditional formatting options that make it easy to apply commonly used conditions to data.

These pre-set options include finding numbers that are above or below the average value for the selected range of data.

== There is no mean to use Excel without applying IF functions to work.
The conditional formula makes a logical test of data .The truth-functional propositional logic can be devoted to develop logical arguments within Excel without opening a textbook.
== The great benefits of using conditional formulas within Excel is that it’s pretty simple, diverse in different specialties to be available in use by all MS excel users, easy to learn and use and provided with useful explanation for their purposes.
== Conditional programming is used in web design and development as well, particularly in the case where a website is visited using different browsers.
== According to me, I usually use conditional formulas when I have a lot of data in my spreadsheets concerning my previous and forthcoming medical research work: - to highlight or “filter” out some of my data based on specific criteria, i.e., to find repetitive equal values (duplicates) between cells and make assumption on presence or absence of medical issue.( records comparison) .
- to find any data anomalies, or how many values fit a specific criteria across a large range of cells in comparable data columns.
This can be emphasized by finding a correlation between age and number of accidental toxicity by detergents consumption, or using COUNTIF function to find values greater than40 and then highlighting cells that match a criteria of my choosing.
- to display icons that are often easier to interpret than the values they represent.
For instance, a simple check-mark might be quicker to discern than the text value yes, on, true, and so on.
- to compare the lists in order to find any discrepancies between two lists.
- to create a plain data set to be alternative of highlighted rows (bands) in tables - which are already include the predefined formats - by using conditional formatting to highlight cells to achieve the alternative bands and improve readability.

It quickly highlights important information in a spreadsheet.
But sometimes the build in formattingrules dont go quite far enough.
Adding your own formula to a conditional formatting rules gives a power boost to helpyou do things the builtin rules cant do.

Using conditional formatting depend on our needed as an example Date functions in Excel make it is possible to perform date calculations,like addition or subtraction, resulting in automated or semi-automated worksheets.
also Highlighting weekends When you design an automated calendar you don't need to color the weekends yourself.
With the conditional formatting tool, you can automatically change the colors of weekends by basing the format on the WEEKDAY function.

The use of conditional formatting is quite extensive.
A simple use is to highlight a cell when stated conditions are met.
An example is to turn the colour of a cell red it it is less than a value and blue if it is equal to or greater than the value.

when you want to create rules / conditions, analyse data and special formatting.

Extract may be a lot of meanings of the numbers on the paper work is difficult.
However, Excel provides a set of methods that help you to quickly analyze data using conditional formatting.
For example, you can use standard colors to distinguish between the values of the high temperatures, medium and low.

use it when you want to make highlight on some special cells that contains some data different than other cells..
not only highlight..
you can use shapes too :)

when there exists n number of conditions for completion of a single task, conditional formatting helps you in better identification of missed or not satisfied condition.

When i need to highlight cells with certain specific criterias or range of criterias

There are too many uses of conditional formatting to be mentioned here.
Bottom line, its main purpose is to automate formatting in a logical way.