Excel 2016: Adding Gradient Formats for Cell Background and Font? - excel

Question

I'm using Microsoft Excel 2016 to construct a forecast model with a range of outputs. I have used Excel's built-in Conditional Formatting setting (Graded Color Scale, to be precise) to make the outputs visually informative, setting a green gradient scale to distinguish between low-valued outputs and high-valued outputs.
The minimum-valued cell background is set to 'Green, Accent 6, Lighter 80%' and the maximum-valued cell background is set to 'Green, Accent 6'. This has worked well. The cell values near the maximum, however, can sometimes be difficult to read, since they are 'Black, Text 1' (not a great contrast with the darker Green).
I am hoping to add the same type of conditional formatting to the cell texts in the range of outputs to generate a color contrast: for example, in the lighter end of the gradient, the cell texts will be 'Black, Text', and in the darker end of the gradient, the cells texts will be 'White, Background.' Visually, that would solve my contrast issue.
Unfortunately, after reading through this forum and searching for conditional formatting guides on Google, I haven't found a solution on how to apply the two types of formatting (background and font) to the same range of cells. I am not practiced in VBA, so I am hoping for any pointer that involves Excel's native functionality, if that's possible.
To boil all this down into a one-liner: "How do I add gradient conditional formatting to both font and background to a range of cells?"
Thank you for the help!

Answer 1

I have done this in the past by creating a number of rules that give the appearance of a gradient on both. To do this however you would create as many rules you need to get the resolution you want. For example:
Suppose you want to assign font and background fill for each value in increments of 10% from 0 to 100%.
For this you need to get 10 font colors in rgb format that gradually shift in the gradient that you want here is a site that can help:
http://www.colorizer.org/
Then do the same with for you background colors.
Now pair a font and background color with the range that you want that rule to apply to and write the excel rule.
While this method is a pain to set up it avoids vba at all costs and if you use the sheet as a template for other sheets you won't have to mess with it much.

Answer 2

Creating your own sets of custom rules as per #rahicks answer in the most comprehensive way of doing this. If you have a fairly stable range of values, then a quick and dirty solution is to use Custom Number Formats.
On top of your current conditional formatting, apply a Custom Number Format using a condition. This example sets the colour to white if the value is greater than 50, and then uses the existing colour otherwise.
[White][>50]General;General
You'll need to replace 50 with the mid-point of your data range and you'll also need to replace both instances of General with whatever number format you currently have on the range.