Excel conditional formatting - Color Scale column by column

[chleidersdorff]

I am a first time poster, so not sure if this is where this question belongs. I have Excel 2013 (and 2010) installed and know how to do color scales and how to do custom formulas but here is my delimma and not sure if it's possible.

I have an excel with >50 columns of data, each column is an analysis method and therefore i can not compare data directly between columns but only within each column.

I like how the 2/3 color scale option in conditional formatting works but if i select the entire >50 columns I get it coloring by max and min (and average) of all the values from all the column. I can go through and select each column individually and then apply the colour scales. However i would like to do the same thing in future on other data and was wondering if there was a method to do this column by column for the entire selection. I tried using a formula in the color scale option with relative reference but it does not seem to possible.


Any help would be much appreciated.