As before, if we get a count of zero, the rule should return TRUE.Ĭonditional formatting tells us instantly that Guava and Tangerine are not in list1. Now you see that Coconut and Fig are not in the second list.įor the second rule, we want to count items in list1. We want to return TRUE if the count is zero. We want to use the same formula we just tested, with a little twist. This will work perfectly for conditional formatting, since we can easily flag items where the count is zero with a formula.įor the first rule, I'll select list1 create a new conditional formatting rule, that uses a formula. If COUNIF returns zero, we know the item is not in list2. We can use COUNIF to count the number of times that each item in list1 appears in list2. COUNIF takes two arguments, a range, and a criteria.
It's not necessary to name the lists, but it will make our formulas easier to read and undertand.įor the formula, we can use the COUNIF function. The first list I'll call list1, and the second list I'll call list2.
We can use conditional formatting with a formula to quickly find and highlight the differences.įirst, I'm going to name each list. Both lists contain the same number of items, but each list is slightly different. This is a great way to visually highlight missing items in a list. In this video, we'll look at how to compare two lists using conditional formatting.
