How can I highlight cells in Google Sheets if current month?

Question

How can I highlight cells in Google Sheets if current month?

The cells have Jan-2017, Feb-2017 etc. and not dates.

I just want the current month highlighted so that the rest of the team can keep track of our monthly stats.

Answer 1

I'm supposing the column that has the months is A, and that the actual values of each cell is the first day of each month (so 2/1/2017 for February for example).

Select where you want the conditional formating to go, and open the conditional formatting sidebar.

Choose "Custom Formula" from the dropdown, and paste the following in:

=$A:$A=(today()-day(today())+1)

What we are doing here is:

• =A$:A$ - Look in column A for the following

• today() get todays date

• -day(today()) get the day and subtract it from the today in the previous point

• +1 add 1 to the result because 2/8/2017 - 8 = 2/0/2017, which google sheets actually recognizes as 1/31/2017, so by adding 1 it will become 2/1/2017 which is what is wanted.

• The result of this sum is then compared to the data found in A$:A$ and the results which match the sum (today()-day(today())+1) are highlighted.