Excel 2019 Bible

CHAPTER 23Visualizing with Custom Number Formats and Shapes

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Custom formatting numbers
• Creating visualizations with shapes and icons
• Creating your own infographic elements
• An overview of Excel's other graphics tools

Visualization is the presentation of abstract concepts or data in visual terms through some sort of graphical imagery. A traffic light, for example, is a visualization of the abstract concepts of stop and go.

In the business world, visualizations help us to communicate and process the meaning of data faster than simple tables of numbers. Excel offers business analysts a wide array of features that can be used to add visualizations to dashboards and reports.

In this chapter, you explore some of the formatting techniques that you can leverage to add layers of visualizations and turn your data into meaningful views.

All of the examples in this chapter are available on this book's website at www.wiley.com/go/excel2019bible. The filename is Visualizations.xlsx.

Visualizing with Number Formatting

When you enter a number into a cell, you can display that number in a variety of different formats. Excel has quite a few built-in number formats, but sometimes there are none that are exactly what you need.

This chapter describes how to create custom number formats, and it provides many examples that you can use as is or adapt to your needs.

Doing ...