Excel Video 49 introduces Color Scales, another Conditional Formatting tool I think you’ll find useful. Color Scales blend either two or three colors in a cell’s background to better highlight the data in the cell. In the example in Excel Video 49, the cell’s background is red if the value is low, yellow if the value is in the middle, and green if the cell’s value is high. Cells with low values have a red background, but as the cell’s value increases towards the middle of the range of cells, the cell’s background turns from red to orange and then to yellow once the cell’s values are in the middle of the range of values in the conditionally formatted cells. As the cell’s value increases further (relative to the other cells in the range you’re formatting), the yellow background grows greener until the cell’s value is at the high end of the range and the cell’s background is completely green. I hope that long explanation will be much clearer after you watch the video.
You can also customize Color Scales to choose which colors blend, so that instead of blending from red to yellow to green, you can choose to blend from light blue to dark blue, for example. Excel will also let you customize how the low, middle, and high points are calculated. If you have a lot of data in your report and you want to quickly identify how the data in the report compares to the range of the data you’re reporting, try Color Scales.
