How to Highlight Upcoming Due Dates in Excel

Tracking deadlines manually can become difficult when your spreadsheet contains dozens—or hundreds—of tasks.

Instead of checking every date yourself, you can make Excel automatically identify deadlines that are overdue, due soon, or on track.

In this tutorial, I'll show you a simple formula that updates automatically as the date changes.

Step 1: Set Up Your Deadline Tracker

Start with a simple table:

ProjectDue DateDeadline AlertBudget ReviewSept. 20, 2026Monthly ReportSept. 24, 2026Dashboard UpdateSept. 30, 2026Training PlanOct. 15, 2026

Your Due Date column contains the deadline, while Deadline Alert will tell you which projects need attention.

Step 2: Automatically Identify Overdue Deadlines

Excel's TODAY() function returns the current date.

That means we can compare a project's due date with today's date.

Enter this formula in the Deadline Alert column:

=IF(B2="","",IF(B2<TODAY(),"OVERDUE","ON TRACK"))

If the due date has already passed, Excel returns OVERDUE.

Otherwise, it returns ON TRACK.

The first part of the formula also keeps the result blank when there is no due date.

Step 3: Flag Deadlines Due Within 7 Days

We can make the tracker even more useful by having Excel warn us before something becomes overdue.

Use:

=IF(B2="","",IF(B2<TODAY(),"OVERDUE",IF(B2<=TODAY()+7,"DUE SOON","ON TRACK")))

Now Excel returns one of three results:

OVERDUE — the deadline has passed
DUE SOON — the deadline is within the next seven days
ON TRACK — the deadline is more than seven days away

Because the formula uses TODAY(), the results automatically change as time passes.

Step 4: Highlight the Results With Conditional Formatting

You can make important deadlines even easier to spot using Conditional Formatting.

Select your Deadline Alert cells and go to:

Home → Conditional Formatting → Highlight Cells Rules → Text That Contains

Create separate rules for:

OVERDUE
DUE SOON
ON TRACK

Choose clearly distinguishable formatting for each status.

Now someone reviewing the tracker can quickly identify which projects require attention without checking every due date manually.

Why This Is Useful

This technique works for much more than project management.

You can use it for:

• Project deadlines

• Action items

• Employee training renewals

• Contract expiry dates

• Invoice due dates

• Compliance deadlines

• Follow-up dates

• Reporting schedules

Instead of relying on someone to remember when something is due, Excel does the checking automatically.

Bonus: Change the Warning Period

Seven days isn't always enough.

For a 14-day warning, change:

TODAY()+7

to:

TODAY()+14

For a 30-day warning, use:

TODAY()+30

This makes the formula easy to adapt to different workflows.

Build a Smarter Excel Project Tracker

Deadline alerts are only one part of an effective project tracking system.

A good tracker can also automatically identify project status, overdue actions, missing information, upcoming milestones and projects requiring management attention.

If you don't want to build all of that from scratch, the Excel PMO Pro Toolkit includes ready-to-use project tracking, dashboard, RAID, Gantt and status-reporting tools.

→ Explore the Excel PMO Pro Toolkit

Need something designed specifically for your organization or workflow?

→ Custom Excel Solutions