Time spent exploring Microsoft’s mountain of Excel resources will often reveal hidden treasures - even to the people who know the program best.
In a recent blog post, the Microsoft Excel team dredged up a golden oldie from 2010 that demonstrates a variety of conditional formatting techniques.
The sample worksheets present a goldmine of common management reports that can be enhanced with appropriate formatting, with explanations on what’s going on in the worksheet in accompanying commentary boxes. They include:
- Highlighting product group summary totals
- Spotting duplicate records in customer lists
- Revenue trend scorecards for different periods with a variety of icons
- Using formulae to format rows, or to compare data in a cell outside the conditionally formatted row.
Follow the instructions here to download the worksheet. If you aren’t ready to tackle Simon Hurst’s tutorials on using PowerPivot to build KPI dashboards, the Microsoft conditional formatting sampler is a great way to get started.
Also see
KPI tutorial 1: Conditional formatting
KPI tutorial 2: Simplify your charts
KPI tutorial 3: Dashboards
KPI tutorial 4: Less clutter, more info
Applied Excel: Building a traffic light KPI dashboard (2008)
Sales analysis at Northwind Traders
Improve your reporting skills with self-teach tutorials
Interested in Pivot Tables? Start here
You might also be interested in