Rule Manager for Excel | Fix Conditional Formatting & Data Validation

Content

• What is Rule Manager for Excel
• Key features
• Why use Rule Manager
• Installation instructions
• Donate
• Instructions
• Issues detected by Rule Manager
• Change history
• Credits

What is Rule Manager for Excel

Rule Manager for Excel is a free add-in that enables you to fix Conditional Formatting and Data Validation rules. Rule Manager is free of charge and works in Excel on-line and Teams, Excel for Windows and Mac 365, both 32 and 64 bits.

Rule Manager for Excel is the only add-in that can fix broken-up conditional formatting and Data Validation rules.

Key features

• Scan Conditional Formatting rules
• Scan Data Validation rules
• Detect multi‑area range issues
• Detect empty‑cell references
• Detect duplicate rules
• Fix inverted bounds
• Fix table‑column partial references
• Highlight affected ranges
• Provide automatic fix suggestions

Why use Rule Manager for Excel

• Fixes issues Excel cannot fix automatically
• Works across Desktop, Web, and Teams
• Saves time cleaning up corrupted rules
• Free and actively maintained

Installation instructions

Web and Teams Excel

Use this button to install Rule Manager for your Excel on-line (it should then automatically also become available in Teams). After clicking the button, a new Excel file will open with this information:

Click the "Accept and Continue" button in the task pane to start using the add-in.

If my website button does not work, open any Excel file in your browser and click the add-ins button. Then search for Rule Manager:

Click Add to add the add-in to your Web Excel.

Desktop Excel

Use this button to install Rule Manager for desktop Excel.

After clicking that button, the browser will ask permission to open Excel. Click Open and Excel will start and display this:

Click the "Accept and Continue" button in the task pane to start using the add-in.

If my button does not work for you, you can also install the tool by opening Excel and clicking Add-ins (On the Home tab):

To add Rule Manager to your Excel, click the Add button. 

Donate

If you like Rule Manager, please consider donating to help support it's future development:

Instructions

Ribbon

To use Rule manager, simply click the Rule manager button on the Review tab. Here is what the ribbon looks like in Windows Desktop Excel:

And this is Excel on-line:

If you have a single-line ribbon:

Buttons and features

Help

After installing the add-in, the pane opens displaying the Help tab, with information about the features of the add-in:

The Help section can be reopened by clicking the Help button in the pane.

Try it

Click the "Try it" button to get a newly inserted worksheet with this information for you to play with:

The tool inserts the worksheet in your active workbook and includes a series of Conditional formattting and Data Validation rules with several issues.

Scanning scope

When you click either the DV or the CF Scan button, what RUle Manager scans depends on your choice of either the active sheet, or all worksheets in the workbook:

CF Scan and DV Scan buttons

CF Scan and DV Scan work very much the same. Both perform a scan of the respective Conditional Formatting or Data Validation rules.

Once a scan is done, all rules are displayed in a scrollable list. The ones marked with "Fix" have potential issues. Note that you can use the arrow keys to move up or down the list of rules.

A rule may have more than one issue. Rule manager will list them all and suggest an automatic fix if there is one. Fixes may come with choices to be made too and you'll be able to select which fixes you want applied, using their associated check-box.

Here's an example of a rule with some issues. Note how the last shown issue is about a rule being applied to multiple areas:

By clicking on the underlined cell references, you can quickly check which range the rule applies to now (red boxes), or to what new range the rule will be applied after you click the Apply button (green box).

For more complicated multiple areas, several options may be available. Below you see an issue offering three choices to fix it:

If you change the selected option, the description "From E3:E4, G6, G9 To E3:G9" will change accordingly and the result range will be highlighted in the sheet.

Note that after applying either the row-wise, or the column-wise fix, a rescan of the rules may still highlight this rule as having an issue (because it now applies to multiple parallel rows/columns).

Updating

If you are not sure you are using the latest version, click inside the Rule Manager pane and press control+F5 to ensure the latest version of Rule Manager is fetched from our server. The build number is listed close to the bottom of the pane.

For Web Excel: Open your browser settings and clear its cache. Then close all browser windows and re-open it.

Issues detected by Rule Manager

Rule Manager detects the following issues:

• Conditional Formatting detections
  • Duplicate rules (fix available)
  • Over-broad applies-to (whole sheet / entire row / entire column) (fix available)
  • Multi-area applies-to (fix available)
  • In-table applies-to (expand within table data area) (fix available)
  • Broken reference in formula (#REF!) (fix available)
  • No condition / empty formula (report only)
  • Empty referenced cells (condition references blanks) (report only)
  • Inverted bounds (e.g., BETWEEN min > max) (fix available)
  • No formatting set on rule (fix available)
  • Named range appears empty (report only)
• Data Validation detections
  • Empty list source (report only)
  • Inverted bounds (e.g., BETWEEN min > max) (fix available)
  • Over-broad applies-to (fix available)
  • Multi-area applies-to (fix available)
  • In-table applies-to (expand within table data area) (fix available)
  • Protected/locked cells in applies-to (fix available)
  • No error alert configured (fix available)
  • Empty referenced cells (validation references blanks) (report only)
  • Named range appears empty (report only)

Change history

• Version 2026-01-21: First public release
• Version 2026-01-15: Beta release

Credits

Special thanks to: Shirley Moreman, Henric Andersen, Khushnood Viccaji, Tim Tow, Roger Govier, and William Budd for doing beta tests.

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Have a look at our other (mostly free) add-ins.

Frequently asked Questions