How to Sort Excel Tables by Color

The video guide shows how you can sort a table by the background color of cells in a specific column. When selecting to sort by Cell Color, you could also select to sort by Font Color.

There are alternatives to color sorts. The first is the ability to filter the same set of cells by color. If you want to sum all cells of a certain color, you can use the SUBTOTAL function to sum visible rows only after applying a filter. Another option is to sort by values. If the colors represent values falling between lower and upper bands, as they do in the video, then a sort by values will achieve the same as a sort by color.

Color sorts can be combined usefully with value sorts. If you have a table containing each salesperson's monthly sales across the course of a year, you may wish to award a bonus to your best salesperson each month, with special bonuses for the top 3 performances across the entire year. If you use conditional formatting to highlight the top performance each month (some kind of MAXIF function would work), then you can sort firstly by color and then by value, to identify your prize winners. This method guards against a scenario in which all the year's best sales performances fall in a single month.

Even in the above scenario, you could add a column to calculate each salesperson's monthly rank, then sort by that before the $ values. The reason to use a color sort is that the color is already present and delivering value. Then a color sort can provide a shortcut to arranging the data as you want it.

By Ed Bolton, founder of Excel4Business Ltd. Last reviewed October 2026.