How to color cells, and alternate row colors in Google Sheets

Key Takeaways

in this video I'm going to show you how to change the color of cells text and also borders in Google sheets then I'm going to show you how to apply alternating colors by using two different methods so let's go ahead and get started with this first example where I'm going to show you how to change the color of an individual cells background color and so what we have here is a list of students and their assignment grades and what we want to do is change the background color of one of the cells that contains a failing grade to red and so how we're going to do this is click on cell c6 and then in the top toolbar menu click fill color and then select the color that you want from the color palette in this case we're going to choose red and so now as you can see that's changed the background color of cell c6 to red and so when you choose the fill color menu in the toolbar this changes the background color of a cell now it's also good to note that you can select custom colors after opening the color palette simply click on custom and this will open the custom color palette where you can choose any color that you want in this example I'm going to show you how to select a range of cells and change the color of multiple cells at once and so what we want to do here is change the color of the cells that are in our header and so to select a range of cells first click on cell a1 and hold your click and then drag your cursor right until you've reached the end of the range that you want to select and then release your click and now I've selected cell a1 cell b1 cell c1 and cell d1 all at the same time and now just like in the last example you can change your color by selecting fill color and in this example I'm going to choose cornflower blue and so now as you can see I've changed the color for all at one time now I'm going to show you how to change the color of an entire row and to do this first you have to select an entire row so in this example I want to select and change the color of row 6 to do this I'm going to click on the number 6 that appears at the very left of row 6 which will select the entire row and all of the cells within it and now just like in the last examples I can change the color by clicking the fill color menu and then selecting the color that I want which in this case is red so now you can see that I've changed the color of row 6 to red changing the color of an entire column is just like changing the color of a row except for that instead of clicking the number to the left of a row to highlight a row you'll click on the letter that's at the top of the column that you want to select and so in this example I want to select and change the color of column D so I'm going to click on the letter D that's at the top of column D now that I've selected the entire column and all of the cells that are in it I simply click the fill color menu and choose the color that I want which in this case is green and so now you can see that I've changed the color of column D to green now I'm going to show you how to apply alternating row colors and with this first method that I'm going to teach you it's the most basic way of using alternating colors which is accessible through the fill color menu and so in this example we're gonna highlight the range a 1 through D 9 by clicking on cell a1 and then dragging our cursor until we reach cell d9 and then once you release your click you will have selected the entire range a 1 through D 9 now we're going to apply alternating colors by clicking on the fill color menu and then click alternating colors now alternating colors will have automatically applied once you've clicked alternating colors but it will have so brought up the menu for you to change a few options and so I'm going to deselect the header because I don't want alternating color in my header and I'm also going to click a style the colors my rows blue now I'm going to scroll down and click done but as you can see there are some other options if you'd like to change them and so now I've applied alternating row colors to my spreadsheet another way that you can apply alternating colors is by using conditional formatting with the custom formula is option and so by using this method you can apply alternating colors to either rows or columns so how we're going to apply alternating colors with conditional formatting is by clicking the format menu on the top toolbar and then click conditional formatting now we want to set our data range which in this case is going to be a 1 through K and then in the format rules section under format cells if I'm going to click the drop-down and then select at the very bottom custom formula is and then I'm going to type equals is even parentheses column and then type a set of parentheses and then another ending parenthesis and press Enter and as you can see this is now colored the even columns in my spreadsheet if you want to change even to odd you can do that and it will color the odd columns it might take a second to load here but it will work and then you can also change column to row if you want to apply alternating colors to rows and so this is how you can apply alternating colors by using conditional formatting with the custom formula is option now I'm going to show you how to color text in Google sheets is basically the same process as coloring the background color which we covered before but we'll select a different menu from the toolbar but from there the process will be the same and so in this example what we want to do is color the text of cell c6 red not the background but the text and so I'm going to click on cell c6 and then instead of clicking the fill color like we did before I'm going to click text color and then I'm simply going to select the color that I want which in this case is red and now you can see that I've colored the text in cell c6 red so now let's go over how to color borders in Google sheets now this is going to be very similar to coloring text and coloring the background color of cells but when you're coloring borders there's one extra step in that you actually have to apply the borders to the cells to see the color change take effect and so in this example I'm going to color the borders of the range A 1 through D 9 red and so I'm going to select the range A 1 through D 9 and then on the top click borders and then when the borders menu opens click border color and then this will open the color palette and then simply select the color that you want but as I mentioned before to actually see this change take effect you need to apply borders to the cells or to the range that you have selected and so I'm going to click borders or all borders and now you can see that the color change has now taken effect in the range A 1 through D 9 I've changed the color of the borders to red in the range A 1 through D 9 so I hope that you liked this video if you did please hit the like and subscribe button and if you want to learn more about using Google sheets or copy and paste the formulas that you saw in this video into your own sheet then I've linked the article for this video below