What feature in Excel allows you to highlight specific cells based on conditions?

Conditional formatting is a powerful feature in Excel that enables users to automatically apply formatting—such as colors, font styles, and borders— to cells based on certain conditions or criteria. This feature enhances data visualization by allowing important trends, patterns, or exceptions within data sets to stand out.

When you set up conditional formatting, you define a rule or condition, and when the data in the specified cells meets this condition, Excel dynamically changes the appearance of those cells. For instance, you might use conditional formatting to highlight all sales figures that exceed a particular threshold, making it easy to identify high-performance areas at a glance.

The other options serve different purposes. Data validation is primarily used to control what data can be entered into a cell, ensuring that only valid entries are made. Data modeling involves creating data structures for analysis and is not concerned with cell formatting. Cell referencing allows you to refer to other cells in formulas but does not provide any formatting capabilities. Therefore, conditional formatting is the correct choice for highlighting specific cells based on conditions.