Learn Excel from MrExcel Episode 905 - Shade Half a Cell

Back to Mr. Excel Netcast, I am Bill John. Today, we have a question sent in by Jed. Jed has a cell where she is drawing a diagonal line through the cell using the border tool and wants to know if she can color just the top half of that cell. Well you can do it but it is rather cumbersome. I am going to come down here to the Drawing Toolbar and under Auto shapes use basic shapes and choose the right triangle.

Now when I draw this right triangle, I want to drag but I am gong to hold down the Alt key while I drag so I can start to drag and then hold down the Alt key, which basically will force the triangle to fit the shape. Now I am going to take that triangle and I want to flip it over, so in that way it is at the top half, I will hold down the Shift key while I click on the green handle and drag around basically now we will get a nice triangle that fills in the top half.

I want to format that using Ctrl+1 and we are going to choose any color in here because I will choose a green and new in Excel 2003, we can change the transparency. So, I am going to go up to about 60% that we have some color where we can still see through it and then importantly we want to turn off the lines say no line. Click Ok and what we have had done now is we formatted the top half of that cell. Now, if we use then format cells and go into the border and set a diagonal line, click Ok.

We now have the illusion that we have colored just the top half of that cell so that might be cool now. Jed did not ask this but I am guessing that they actually want to have something on top and on the bottom of that line and the cool way to do this is to type a few spaces. And then type the number that you go above the line and then Alt+Enter. Hold down Alt+Enter and without typing any spaces type the number that goes below line.

And basically what we do is we turn or Wrap Text and you see that we have a number that appears above the line and below the line. So, in that case I can see again we would do pretty much the same trick as before. I am actually going to copy it up here and see if I could just resize it to create a triangle that will color just above the line.

Now of course, everytime that we change the column width or change the row height we are going to have to go through and adjust this triangle. So very, very cumbersome but if you just simply need to make it work, there is certainly a way to have it work. All right, well I want to thank you for stopping by. Well see you next time for another Netcast from Mr. Excel.