Microsoft® Office 2010 Bible

Chapter 19. Communicating Data Visually

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding Excel's Conditional Formatting feature

Using the graphical conditional formats

Using conditional formatting formulas

Reviewing tips for using conditional formatting

Introducing the new sparklines graphics feature

Adding sparklines to a worksheet

Customizing sparklines

Making a sparkline display only the most recent data

This chapter explores conditional formatting, one of Excel's most versatile features. You can apply conditional formatting to a cell so that the cell looks different, depending on its contents. Microsoft made significant enhancements to conditional formatting in Excel 2007, and it's now a useful tool for visualizing numerical data. You'll find a few more conditional formatting improvements in Excel 2010.

This chapter also introduces sparklines and presents examples that demonstrate how they can be used in your worksheets. A sparkline looks like a small chart within a single cell.

About Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting enables you to apply cell formatting selectively and automatically, based on the contents of the cells. For example, you can set things up so that all negative values in a range have a light-yellow background color. When you enter or change a value in the range, Excel examines the value and checks the conditional formatting rules for the cell. If the value is negative, the background is shaded. If not, no formatting is applied.

Conditional formatting is a useful way to quickly identify ...