Mastering Excel: Advanced Charting and Conditional Formatting Techniques

In this article I’m going to be talking about some intermediate level Excel skills for data analysts. In the previous articles we talked about basic charts like bar charts, column charts and pie charts, how to create them using your dataset and when to use each chart appropriately. Lets look at some more charts in Excel. Today we are going to look at the following charting techniques,

• Heat Mapping

• Histograms

• Waterfall charts

Heat Mapping

We can use heat mapping in Excel to to visually represent data intensity using colors. Lets take the below dataset for example,

In order to create heat mapping,

• Select your numerical data range. In this case the “Score column“

• Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Color Scales > And select your desired color scale

As you can see, higher values will be shown in darker shades whereas lower values will be shown in lighter colors.

Histograms

A Histogram shows how data is distributed across ranges. Lets take the below dataset,

In order to create a histogram,

• Select your data range

• Go to Insert > Statistics Chart > Select Histogram

The histogram shows bars representing the number of people in each age range.

Waterfall Charts

A Waterfall Chart shows changes in value over time. I will use the below dataset to demonstrate waterfall charts,

To create a waterfall chart,

• Select your data range

• Go to Insert > Waterfall charts > Select the waterfall chart

• You can modify the chart to use different colors for better readability

This chart shows a stepwise increase/decrease of financial values.

In summary,

• If you want to visually identify patterns, trends and anomalies in a large dataset, you heat mapping. It helps to analyze multiple variables, identify high/low values at a glance and makes it easier to spot insights through color coding. Heat mapping is valuable for quick data analysis.

• If you want to compare data ranges, use histograms. Its valuable to visualize data distribution or comparing the frequency of data across groups.

• If you want to analyze the change of a value over time, use waterfall charts. This is particularly useful for understanding the breakdown of financial data like profit and loss

The next topic we are going to discuss is conditional formatting. It is a valuable data visualization tool is Excel just like charts. We already saw how to use the conditional formatting feature with heat mapping. Lets take a look at some more uses of conditional formatting,

Highlighting Outliers

If you want to identify any deviations or outliers of a numerical value set, you can use conditional formatting to visually represent your condition. Lets take the below dataset,

Lets say I want to visualize salaries higher than 10000.00

• Select your numerical data column

• Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cell Rules > Greater than

• Enter your conditional value which is 10000 in this case

As you can see, the affected rows are highlighted as per the formatting colors you have chosen. Similarly there are multiple cell rules that you can use to get insights into your data.

Color Scaling

Another way of visualizing your dataset is to use color scaling. This is what we did earlier as heat mapping, so I’m not going to repeat that here.

Icon Sets

Icon sets can be used to provide visual signals in your dataset. Lets look at the below dataset,

Lets say I want to identify a trend in the revenue.

• Select your data column you want to compare

• Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Icon sets > Select the desired icon set

This is a pretty cool feature. Once you add these visual signals, you can even filter your data by the icon.

Before we finish today’s article, lets do a practice round,

Tasks:

1. Create a Pivot Table to analyze Total Sales per Region

   • Select the data table

   • Go to Insert > Pivot Table > From Table/ Range

   • Drag Region to the Rows area

   • Drag Sales to the Values area

   • Now you have the total sales per region

2. Build a Pivot Chart

   • Click on the pivot chart

   • Go to Insert > Pivot Chart

3. Create a Heat Map to visualize profit margins

   • Select the profit column

   • Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Color Scales > Select the Color Scale required

4. Build a Histogram for sales distribution

   • Select Sales and Region columns

   • Go to Insert > Statistics Chart > Histogram

5. Apply Conditional Formatting to highlight top 2 performing products

   • Select the profit column

   • Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Top/ Bottom Rules > Top 10 Items

   • Reduce the amount from 10 to 2

   • Select the format you want to use to highlight the affected cells

   • Click ok

Thats all for todays article. Hope you learned something new :)