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How can I conditionally format an entire row in Excel based upon the data in one of the columns in that row?

ChasFile — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:33:34 -0800

How can I conditionally format an entire row in Excel 2007 based upon the contents of a particular column in that row? Say row 1 column J, row 4 column J, and row 19 column J all contain "Alice." I'd like rows 1, 4, and 19 all to appear with a red background. Say row 2 column J, row 44 column J, and row 45 column J all contain "Bob." I'd like for rows 2, 44, and 45 all to appear with a blue background. And so forth.

Basically, what I'm asking is how to make a relative column reference in a formula. I remember doing precisely this using VBScript for Excel years ago, but for the life of me can't locate that old code. Anyway, something along the lines of the following psuedo-code entered into the Conditional Formatting dialog box:

Apply "Format 1" according to the following formula [assuming (y,x) refers to (column y, row x)]:

=IF((J,ROW())="Alice")

It might also be nice to do this with a named range, so that if I apply the name "First_Name" to the entirety of row J, the formula is then a bit clearer:

=IF((First_Name,ROW())="Alice")

Total n00b0 question, I'm sure, but I don't spend much time in Excel, and am would very much appreciate the help. Thanks!

What's the total number of death row inmates and the average cost to hold them?

sipher — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 09:19:45 -0800

How much money could be saved if California executed all the prisoners on death row tomorrow? What about the country? So I've been trying to find state or national prison statistics on the number of people currently on death row and the average cost per day to hold them. This is unsurprisingly difficult. Most of the statistics I can find are either outdated by many years or don't include anything related to death row.

Any ideas?

A query connundrum.

Civil_Disobedient — Sun, 03 Sep 2006 05:51:38 -0800

Attention SQL gurus. This has me completely stumped. How can I find the index (position) of a row in a table without querying the entire set? Here is the situation:

I have a web application that has some ajaxified tables on many of the pages. These tables show various slices of data. Most of the tables are about 10 rows per page, so for example, if the table was a list of all Customers, and you've got 10,000 customers, that would be 1,000 pages of customers.

To initially show the table, I have to do two queries: one is the initial 10 rows that are to be displayed, the other is a count(*) to get the total amount of rows.

Here is the problem:

I have a particular customer ID in my hand. I'd like the webtable to take this ID and jump to the correct page that will show that customer. Naturally, it has to take into account sorting.

Hypothetical simplified example:

ID    NAME

1102  C_D's Tavern

1294  Bob's Discount Dairy

1299  Chico's House of Wicker

...

9309  Larry's Llama Emporium

If I sort by ID (natural order), the index of Bob's Discount Dairy would be 2, Chico's Hosue of Wicker would be 3, etc. If I'm displaying "page 1", that means the first 10 indexes, so I know those two would be on the first page. "OK, so what page is ID# 5129 on?" That's the problem.

What I want to know is if there's a way to figure out the index of a particular ID without having to query the entire dataset. Or if I do have to query the entire dataset, I'd like it to be as painless as possible. Another important note: some of these queries are being run off of VIEWs, which could complicate things.

This is on Microsoft SQL Server 2000.