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In Google Sheets, how do you conditionally color cells based on whether the cell's value is accelerating or decelerating?

For example, in the image below, I created four columns: the time, distance, speed, and acceleration. The acceleration is just the second derivative of the distance. How would I conditionally color the background of the distance column based on the acceleration column in Google sheets? I would not like to create separate columns for speed and acceleration, instead, just relying on the distance column itself.

distance, speed, acceleartion

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Use the Format > Conditional Formatting tool.

First, select a cell in the distance column. We want this to be red or green based on the corresponding acceleration value in the same row.

You want to use a custom formula (bottom option) and then make it read =Dx>0 See the recreation I have done. You will need to do this for each value in distance.

sampledata

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  • A few things: (1) Is there any way to do this without first creating the acceleration column? (2) Also, any way to turn it into a gradient rather than a single color? (3) Finally, it looks like you need to have a different formula for each cell, any way you can setup something automatic?
    – speedplane
    Nov 23, 2016 at 1:00

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