by From this short tip you will learn how to quickly sort cells by background and font color in Excel 365 - Excel 2010 worksheets.
Last week we explored different ways to count and sum cells by color in Excel. If you've had a chance to read that article, you may wonder why we neglected to show how to filter and sort cells by color. The reason is that sorting by color in Excel requires a bit different technique, and this is exactly what we are doing to do right now.
Sort by cell color in Excel
Sorting Excel cells by colour is the easiest task compared to counting, summing and even filtering. Neither VBA code nor formulas are needed. We are simply going to use the Custom Sort feature available in all versions of Excel 365 through Excel 2007.
- Select your table or a range of cells.
- On the Home tab > Editing group, click the Sort & Filter button and select Custom Sort…
- In the Sort dialog window, specify the following settings from left to right.
- The column that you want to sort by (the Delivery column in our example)
- To sort by Cell Color
- Choose the color of cells that you want to be on top
- Choose On Top position
- Click the Copy Level button to add one more level with the same settings as the first one. Then, under Order, select the color second in priority. In the same way add as many levels as many different colors are in your table.
- Click OK and verify if your rows have got sorted by color correctly.
In our table, the "Past Due" orders are on top, then come "Due in" rows, and finally the "Delivered" orders, exactly as we wanted them.
Tip: If your cells are colored with many different colors, it is not necessary to create a formatting rule for each and every one of them. You can create rules only for those colors that really matter for you, e.g. "Past due" items in our example and leave all other rows in the current order.
If sorting cells by only one color is what you are looking for, then there's even a quicker way. Simply click on the AutoFilter arrow next to the column heading you want to sort by, choose Sort by color from the drop down menu, and then select the color of cells that you want to be on top or at the bottom. BTW, you can also access the "Custom Sort" dialog from here, as you can see in the right hand part of the screenshot below.
Sort cells by font color in Excel
In fact, sorting by font colour in Excel is absolutely the same as sorting by background color. You use the Custom Sort feature again (Home > Sort & Filter > Custom Sort…), but this time choose Font Color under "Sort on", as shown in the screenshot below.
If you want to sort by just one font color, then Excel's AutoFilter option will work for you too:
Apart from arranging your cells by background colour and font color, there may a few more scenarios when sorting by color comes in very handy.
Sort by cell icons
For example, we can apply conditional formatting icons based on the number in the Qty. column, as shown in the screenshot below.
As you see, big orders with quantity more than 6 are labeled with red icons, medium size orders have yellow icons and small orders have green icons. If you want the most important orders to be on top of the list, use the Custom Sort feature in the same way as described earlier and choose to sort by Cell Icon.
It is enough to specify the order of two icons out of 3, and all the rows with green icons will get moved to the bottom of the table anyway.
How to filter cells by color in Excel
If you want to filter the rows in your worksheet by colors in a particular column, you can use the Filter by Color option available in Excel 365 - Excel 2016.
The limitation of this feature is that it allows filtering by one color at a time. If you want to filter your data by two or more colours, perform the following steps:
- Create an additional column at the end of the table or next to the column that you want to filter by, let's name it "Filter by color".
- Enter the formula
=GetCellColor(F2)in cell 2 of the newly added "Filter by color" column, where F is the column congaing your colored cells that you want to filter by. - Copy the formula across the entire "Filter by color" column.
- Apply Excel's AutoFilter in the usual way and then select the needed colors in the drop-down list.
As a result, you will get the following table that displays only the rows with the two colors that you selected in the "Filter by color" column.
And this seems to be all for today, thank you for reading!
46 comments
After I select "font color" under the "Sort On" column I attempt to select a color under "Order" but the only option available to select is "Automatic". Any idea what I am doing incorrectly?
Hello,
Perhaps, there are no cells with another font color except Automatic in the column you select for sorting.
Hi
On the drop down menu at the top of the column the "sort by..." feature does not come up, just "custom sort". How do I get color sort back?
Thanks
Hi Kevin,
Please check that there are cells with more than one font or fill color in the selected column.
I appreciate the effort put into explaining the features present in Excel.
Thanks.
We have data in a spreadsheet that has been subtotaled. There are certain lines that we want to look at and have changed the cell color for that data. But now we can't seem to sort by the cell color. Is that because the data is already subtotaled?
please tell me how to exit from this function
Gud work
my excel worksheet cell have colors in it, not in all. But the problem is i cannot see the cell color when try to sort by color. Why?
Why do only some of the greens go to the top when I sort by color? How do I fix this? It seems like the ones using conditional formatting don't sort.
How to filler a particular data based on their color in a work book,
"GETCELLCOLOR"
I have not any formula like that?
where can I find or add this formula?
Hello, Kaveh,
Please have a look at this article How to count and sum cells by color
WHen i enter the Getcellcolor formula it does not work. am i missing something?
Hello, John,
Please have a look at this article How to count and sum cells by color
For some reason I have a spreadsheet and on some columns i can sort by color than that option is frozen when trying to select other columns. All columns have at least some color in them. Any thoughts?
Hello, Josh,
To help you better, we need a sample table with your data in Excel. You can email it to support@ablebits.com. Please add the link to this article and your comment number.
How do you sort data with cell colors by top primary and top secondary? Is it similar to sorting the data cell colors like either on top or bottom
Hello, Ross,
To help you better, we need a sample table with your data in Excel. You can email it to support@ablebits.com. Please add the link to this article and your comment number.
i want to give colors in regular order
for example
first row-red
second row-blue
third row- yellow
again
fourth row-red
fifth row-blue
sixth row-yellow
hope you can help me
Hello, Habeeb,
To help you better, we need a sample table with your data in Excel. You can email it to support@ablebits.com. Please add the link to this article and your comment number.
! have a table of 20 soccer teams the columns are:-
Column A= Position
Column B= Team
Column C= Points
At the season s end the top 4 Qualify for champions league (green)
positions 5&6 for Europa league (brown)
positions 18,19,20 are relegated to a lower league (red)
I want each gropu of eventualities to have all their cells a certain colour as above, and to maintain their colour when the table is sorted
many thanks
Dave H
Hello, Dave,
To help you better, we need a sample table with your data in Excel. You can email it to support@ablebits.com. Please add the link to this article and your comment number.
Is there a possibility that we can sort two different colors in a single cell. e.g. First Name and Last Name are copied in a single cell, however, in different colors. Is there a way of sorting them? I hope, I made myself clear!
Hi Ankur,
The easiest way is to convert your data to an Excel table (select it and press Ctrl+T or click the Insert tab > Table). Then, simply click the Filter drop-down arrow in the Name column's header, choose Sort by Color and select the color you want to sort by. If you want to add sorting by a second color, then click Sort by Color > Custom Sort... > Copy Level and choose the second color.
THIS ROCKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This was incredibly useful. Good job putting these intructions together.
I want to use exactly this but I would like Excel to sort automatically as the cell color changes.
For example I have a budget with a pull down list as follows
"Paid"
"Quoted"
"Deposit"
etc
When the cell is Paid conditional formatting is set to fill grey the entire cell row.I would also like the Greyed items to automatically go to the bottom of the list?
Hello Nick,
Regrettably, this cannot be done using Excel formulas, a VBA macro is needed.
Hi Nick,
Hope this might helpful for your request. First conditionally format the row to be grey once the cell value is equal to grey.
Then apply a custom sort to get the grey colored cell to bring down to the bottom of the data using custom sort function. You may need to click on the sort reapply button to make this happen after each new entry.
Let me know if you need help on this.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, what a great & easy to follow tutorial
This was just what I needed
Thank you very much for your kind feedback, Joe!