A look at Excel 2007 data bars and color scale features. These new features allow you to quickly see the largest/smallest values in a sea of numbers. Episode 396 shows you how.
This blog is the video netcast companion to the upcoming book, Excel 2007 Miracles Made Easy. Download a new two minute video every Tuesday and Thursday to learn one of the tips from the book!
This blog is the video netcast companion to the upcoming book, Excel 2007 Miracles Made Easy. Download a new two minute video every Tuesday and Thursday to learn one of the tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast, I'm Bill Jelen.
Well it's 2007 Tuesday, every Tuesday and Thursday I'm going to talk about what's coming in the new version of Excel, Excel 2007, which will be on your retail shelves at the last week in January 2007.
Of course, any big corporate subscribers who have MSDN, you might already have this installed, so, check with your IT department to see if you can go ahead and get a copy of Excel 2007, now!
One of the great new features that they added to Excel 2007 is in the area of Data Visualization.
When you have a whole sea of numbers, and you're trying to figure out, you know, what the trends are at the numbers.
Sometimes we’ll want to use something called Data Visualization, and it happens under the Conditional Formatting drop-down on the home Ribbon.
So I've selected a range of cells here, going to go to Conditional Formatting and choose Data Bars, and there's six different colors of data bars that we can build.
I'm basically using live preview, and you see that if I hover over a data bar in the menu, my data automatically updates to show the value.
So there, I'll choose a data bar, and basically what happens is, in every cell I get a little in-cell bar chart, and the size of the bar indicates how large the numbers are.
So, instantly I can see that these are my largest customers here, and that's my smallest customer.
Great way to really kind of enhance a table of numbers, make sure you do some of the other options in Data Visualizations.
There's also something under Conditional Formatting called a Color Scale.
Basically, that will apply a heat map, largest numbers in red, smallest numbers in green or blue, depending on which version you choose.
Again, a great way to spot trends in the data, and have your eye drawn to the largest or smallest numbers.
Just one of the many great new features coming in Excel 2007.
Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you tomorrow for another netcast from MrExcel!
Well it's 2007 Tuesday, every Tuesday and Thursday I'm going to talk about what's coming in the new version of Excel, Excel 2007, which will be on your retail shelves at the last week in January 2007.
Of course, any big corporate subscribers who have MSDN, you might already have this installed, so, check with your IT department to see if you can go ahead and get a copy of Excel 2007, now!
One of the great new features that they added to Excel 2007 is in the area of Data Visualization.
When you have a whole sea of numbers, and you're trying to figure out, you know, what the trends are at the numbers.
Sometimes we’ll want to use something called Data Visualization, and it happens under the Conditional Formatting drop-down on the home Ribbon.
So I've selected a range of cells here, going to go to Conditional Formatting and choose Data Bars, and there's six different colors of data bars that we can build.
I'm basically using live preview, and you see that if I hover over a data bar in the menu, my data automatically updates to show the value.
So there, I'll choose a data bar, and basically what happens is, in every cell I get a little in-cell bar chart, and the size of the bar indicates how large the numbers are.
So, instantly I can see that these are my largest customers here, and that's my smallest customer.
Great way to really kind of enhance a table of numbers, make sure you do some of the other options in Data Visualizations.
There's also something under Conditional Formatting called a Color Scale.
Basically, that will apply a heat map, largest numbers in red, smallest numbers in green or blue, depending on which version you choose.
Again, a great way to spot trends in the data, and have your eye drawn to the largest or smallest numbers.
Just one of the many great new features coming in Excel 2007.
Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you tomorrow for another netcast from MrExcel!
