Sort by Color in Excel

You can sort by font and cell color in Excel. Here's how.

Did you know you can sort by cell or font color in Excel? This can be a handy feature if you are sifting through a list of a lot of data for very particular details, particularly when you’re doing a text search and you need to be able to mark them for some reason. Here's how you do it.

First, you set a formatting rule.

1. Go to Conditional Formatting. We'll do a text sort.
2. Select highlight cell rules and then more rules.
3. Enter the specific text you're looking for. The options are:
   1. Containing
   2. Not containing
   3. Beginning with
   4. Ending with.
   5. We’ll select “containing” and we're going to search for DR with a space behind it.
4. Now select “format” and make sure you choose a fill color.

So now we have a bunch of rows that are formatted with that fill color and we want to mark those rows for export or for whatever reason.

The next step you take is to do a sort.

• I'm going to go to Sort and Filter
• Select “custom sort.”
• I want to sort on the name row
• Sort on cell color.
• The color I want to sort on is yellow.
• Indicate if you want the colored cells on top or on the bottom.

The sort command picks up whichever cell colors are available in the sample. If I had multiple colors, it would offer multiple colors to sort on. And then I say I want that color on top, and I say okay.

Now I have all of that data grouped together for each management. And that's how you sort by color in Excel.