Video Transcript

MAN: So now that I've kinda gone through all these tabs and a lot of the things you can do with Google Documents, I just want to go into a couple more advanced things that are actually really useful. So one thing you can do is you can change text color and background color with rules. So let me show you how to do that. To apply it to a number of cells, I'm just going to select them. And what I'll do is I'll go into either text color or background color. I like using background color. And then just click on the Change with rules, and you get this Change colors based on rules pop-up. And it's pretty simple. If you've ever created a rule in, like, e-mail or anything like that, you've got the Text contains, Text does not contain, Text is exactly, Cell is empty, and then you have some date options: Date is, Date is before, Date is after. And then you have: Greater than, Less than, Is equal to, Is not equal to, Is between, Is not in between or your number options. So let's just stick on Text. And then you want to do Text contains and then what it is. The text is paid. Then I want to set--I can set the Text and the Background colors from this same location. So I'll click on Background. And like for this I'm using as--on this pretend budget, whenever I mark a bill as "paid," it'll pop up green automatically, and I won't have to manually change the color. So let me show you real fast. I can add multiple rules at a time. If it says, "wait," or if it says, "received," if it says, "wait," I want yellow, 'cause that means I received the bill--or excuse me, I want red because it has not come in. Received means I've received the bill. And I made it yellow because I have not paid it yet. So let's see what happens when I save these rules. You can see automatically it made changes right here to my document. And let's say I went in here and I paid this bill, so now I want to change it back to "wait." You could see it automatically goes red. If we changed something to "received," it automatically goes yellow. So if you use color coding, like I do, in a lot of spreadsheets, this is a really easy way to automatically color-code if you're color-coding a particular way. And it's also useful 'cause some people might just color-code with no text. You might just say, "Okay, green is paid," and not put--actually write "paid" right there. But it's probably good to include the text because then you have the option to sort, and you can't really sort by color. So, keep that in mind, but this makes it really easy to automatically change that color so you don't have to go up here and then find the color again. And just remember when you're doing this, you can apply it to only certain parts by selecting a row or column or whatever you want to apply the rules to, select that before you go into it. But that's how you change rules with--change the color of a cell using rules.