Office 2013 Bible: The Comprehensive Tutorial Resource

Chapter 19

Communicating Data Visually

IN THIS CHAPTER

Taking advantage of tables

Understanding Excel’s conditional formatting feature

Using the graphical conditional formats

Using conditional formatting formulas

Reviewing tips for using conditional formatting

Introducing the sparkline graphics feature

Adding sparklines to a worksheet

Customizing sparklines

Making a sparkline display only the most recent data

This chapter explores some versatile formatting features for summarizing, highlighting, and presenting data. The chapter starts by introducing Excel’s table feature, which you can use to not only apply colorful formatting to a list of data, but also to filter and total the data, among other benefits.

You can apply conditional formatting to a cell so that the cell looks different, depending on its contents. Conditional formatting is a useful tool for visualizing numeric data. In some cases, conditional formatting may be a viable alternative to creating a chart.

Finally, you can create sparklines to illustrate data values within a cell. Sparklines appear like mini charts and offer a surprising amount of formatting flexibility.

Creating a Table

A table is a rectangular range of structured data. Each row in the table corresponds to a single entity. For example, a row can contain information about a customer, a bank transaction, an employee, a product, and so on. Each column contains a specific piece of information. For example, if each row contains information about an employee, ...