How to grey out cells based on another column or drop down list choice in excel?

Excel's Conditional Formatting is a feature that is both one of the simplest straightforward and one of the most powerful features. When you want to highlight cells in Excel that meet a certain criterion, you can utilize a feature in Excel called conditional formatting, which gives the functionality as its name. It provides you with the capability to rapidly construct a visual analysis layer on top of your data set. Using the conditional formatting feature in Excel, you can generate heat maps, display increasing or decreasing icons, and do a number of other useful things.

In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to highlight a cell based on the dropdown value of another column.

Grey Out Cells Based on value of Another Column

You can format a cell or a range of cells in Excel based on the value that is included in it by using a feature called conditional formatting. On the other hand, there are situations when, rather than simply highlighting the cell, you would want the entire row or column to be highlighted based on the value in one cell.

Step 1

In our example, we have name of the employees and their payment status in our Excel sheet. We want to grey out those names who are paid.

Step 2

To create a dropdown list, select column B, which is payment status column. Then click Data > Data Validation.

From the Data Validation window, select Setting, then from the Validation Criteria, select List from Allow list, then from Source, select Source Data and then click OK.

In our case, we have selected B2 and B3. See the following image −

Step 3

Select the cells in the column A which we want to grey out. Then select Home > Conditional Formatting > New Rule.

Step 4

In the New Formatting Rule dialogue, choose Use a formula to determine which cells to format. Then, in the Formula values where this formula is true, type =B2="Paid".

Then, click Format to go to the Format Cells dialogue. Under the Fill tab, choose the grey color. Then click OK. See the below given image.

After clicking OK, you would notice that the names of employees whose "Payment_Status" is paid are greyed. See the following image.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we explained how to grey out cells based on the dropdown value of another column.