Excel Tips: Make your Data more Presentable with Conditional Formatting

In my previous post (click here to view), I have written a post about the use of online surveying and have recommended a very useful website that can help you do so free of charge. It makes work a lot easier if compared to doing the survey manually on the streets.

After I have conducted the survey, it is now time to present the findings using Microsoft Excel. Very often, when you present your huge amount of data in excel, it will look monotonous and hard to understand. So in this post, I am going to show you how to make your excel presentation more interesting by using conditioning formatting.

Below is the screenshot of the excel sheet without using conditioning formatting

And here’s another screenshot of the sheet after applying the conditioning formatting

The presentation looks much nicer now. This is because we interpret data more easily by looking at graph rather than merely looking at numbers.

Here’s how you can add the data bars in your excel sheet:

1. Open a blank worksheet in your Excel 2007.

2. Key in all you data in a column.

3. Then highlight the data and on your Home tab, in the Style group, click conditional formatting.

4. Point on Data Bars and choose the color that you prefer.

The data bars will appear in your entire data cell giving you a graphical representation of the value of each number in comparison with the other values.

The data bars will “sticks” to the cells and change accordingly depending on the value entered into the cell.