Highlight Pandas DataFrame's specific columns using applymap()

# importing pandas as pd 
import pandas as pd 

# creating the dataframe  
df = pd.DataFrame({"A" : [14, 4, 5, 4, 1], 
                   "B" : [5, 2, 54, 3, 2],
                   "C" : [20, 20, 7, 3, 8],
                   "D" : [14, 3, 6, 2, 6]}) 

print("Original DataFrame :")
display(df)

# function definition
def highlight_cols(s):
    color = 'red' if s < 6 else 'blue'
    return 'background-color: % s' % color

# highlighting the cells
display(df.style.applymap(highlight_cols))

# function definition
def highlight_cols(s):
    return 'background-color: % s' % 'yellow'

# highlighting the cells
display(df.style.applymap(highlight_cols, 
                          subset = pd.IndexSlice[:, ['B', 'C']]))

df.style.applymap(highlight_cols, subset = pd.IndexSlice[:, ['B', 'C']])