Formatting with Multiple Conditions in Google Sheets

In my Etsy adventures, I'm always trying to find ways to improve my productivity. Streamlining my process for finding good tag phrases for my Etsy listings has been one of my main focuses!

The Problem

I've been tinkering with Google Sheets for a while now and I've built a large tag database. Since the file has become so large, it is cumbersome to look at several columns of data!

I want to be able to look at only the tag column and determine at a glance if that word has good stats.

The Hypothesis

The pseudo code/ map of what I had in mind looked something like this:

for columnA (Tag) 
if columnB (Competition) is "Very Low" 
and
columnC (Engagement) is "Very High"
then
color columnA Bright Green

Basically, I want the cells of column A to be bright green when column B is "Very Low" and column C is "Very High." Low competition and high engagement; the sweet spot!

The Solution

Low and behold, I discovered Able Bits, which posted about this exact scenario. Huge thank you to them!

In short, I used the AND function to achieve the formatting I wanted. It does exactly what I was hoping for: formats the color of cells in column A when conditions from columns B and C are met.

=AND($B:$B="Very Low",$D:$D="Very High")

The End Result

I set up multiple formatting conditions for column A. Since there won't be a large number of ideal keywords that fit the criteria perfectly, I wanted to make a scale of colors going from red (meets the least requirements) to Bright Green (meets all the requirements.)

Now I can look at one column to determine which keywords I want to use instead as opposed to several; saving lots of time and energy (and eye strain!)

Apple Numbers Functions and Syntax Examples

In my Etsy Adventures, I've been trying to find what workflow works best for the various types of tasks involved with being an Etsy seller.

I moved over to Google Sheets for most of my spreadsheet work, but I found that Apple Numbers is actually quite powerful! I can see myself using it in the future, so I wanted to document some of the formulas and syntax used in my Etsy spreadsheet work.

[Google Sheets] Filter Multiple Conditions

In my Etsy adventures I've collected a huge list of keywords (12,000+!) I use a combination of Marmalead and Etsy Rank for my keyword research and use Google Sheets to organize them.

The Problem

In this keyword acquisition exercise, I ended up with a ton of keywords that were generally relevant, but didn't quite describe my particular product. So I've been looking for ways to isolate only the keywords that are relevant to the products that I offer right now, without losing keywords that may be relevant later. My thought was to use the Google Sheets "filter."

tackling multiple conditions

I quickly found that within the GUI of Google Sheets, it wasn't an option to filter by multiple conditions; phrases that contain only certain words. Basically a series of OR logic statements/conditions.

use pseudo code to plan (I'm old)

I'm from the old school and I almost always need to write pseudo code to visualize and plan how I'm going to approach a problem. It looked something this like this:

In column A, only show results that contain the words, "perler, nintendo, gift, geek, or nerd"

'REGEXmatch' formula

Now that I know what I'm doing, I found that I can use a regular expression in the filter custom formula input to tell Google Sheets to filter the results using the required multiple conditions.

There is plenty of literature about regex within the Google Sheets documentation if you're curious about why this works. The important thing to pay attention to are the terms separated by the "|" (pipe) characters. This is where you will enter your list of terms to filter by.

Save as Filter View

Make sure to save this filter view so that you can toggle these conditions easily!

Filtered view mode has these grey borders.

Save as Filter View