This tip is one of my favourites, and I have used it a lot for trading systems.

Suppose there's something sooo fundamental on your sheet that if you get it wrong, the consequences can be very costly indeed. Well, as a system designer, you should try your hardest to protect users from making thes mistakes.

Conditional formatting helps enormously here.

In my trading system, I have formatted the headings so that if you change the BUY to a SELL, the headings change colour from blue to red automatically.

BUY:

SELL:

The way to do this is the following:

Select the cells you want to format like this:

In Excel 2007, from the Home ribbon, select conditional formatting => new rule, then set the formula as below:

...choose the format you want in the event that the formula is true, and there you go !

Similar in Excel 2003..
Format => conditional formatting... then same principles apply.

Video Training on conditional formatting: