It’s relatively easy to apply conditional formatting in an Excel worksheet. It’s a built-in feature on the Home tab of the Excel ribbon, and there many resources on the web to get help (see for example what Debra Dalgleish and Chip Pearson have to say). Conditional formatting of charts is a different story. People often ask how to conditionally [...]

You may want to highlight certain ranges of values in a chart, to make it easier to judge the values in the chart. For example, you may want to highlight “good” values with green or blue, and “bad” values with red. Or you may want to highlight the standard deviation bands in a control chart. [...]

I built an interesting example of the Excel Chart With Horizontal Bands this morning. A user on Excel Forum wanted a way to present soil analysis data, where the typical values for each element tested were very different, and the cutoffs between different ranges of results (i.e., low, medium, high) were not only different, but [...]

When analyzing survey results, for example, there may be a numerical scale that has associated text labels. This may be a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 means “Completely Dissatisfied” and 5 means “Completely Satisfied”, with other labels in between. The data can be plotted by value, but it’s not obvious how to place [...]

When analyzing survey results, for example, there may be a numerical scale that has associated text labels. This may be a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 means “Completely Dissatisfied” and 5 means “Completely Satisfied”, with other labels in between. The data can be plotted by value, but it’s not obvious how to place [...]

In Invert Excel Chart Format if Negative I showed the technique that allows you to select which colors for positive and negative points in a column or bar chart. This technique works in Excel versions up to and including Excel 2003, but doesn’t work in Excel 2007. Up until now I thought you couldn’t get [...]