

Done!įor example, here's how you can use a 3-color scale (red-white-blue) to "map" air temperatures:īy default, for 3-color scales, Excel uses the 50th percentile, also known as median or midpoint. Point to Color Scales and choose the type you want.On the Home tab, in the Styles group, click Conditional Formatting.Select a range of cells that you want to format.To add a color scale to your worksheet, follow these steps: Also, you can create a custom scale with a palette of your choosing. Microsoft Excel has a number of preset 2-color or 3-color scales, which can be customized to your liking. They work nice for representing data categories that have no inherent order like industries, territories, species, etc. Qualitative or categorical - these are a few different colors such as red, blue, green, etc.never, rarely, sometimes, often, always). They are perfect for visualizing frequencies, priorities, perceptions, or behavioral changes (e.g. Diverging shades reveal more differences in values than sequential colors. Diverging, aka bipolar or double-ended - they can be thought of as two opposite facing sequential color schemes combined together.For example, a medium green color says: "this value is a bit higher than the light green but lower than the dark green". They are best suited for visualizing numbers that go from low to high. Sequential - gradients of the same hue going from light to dark or the other way round.There exist three main types of color scales: They come in especially handy to visualize relationships between numerical values in large datasets.Ī typical example is heat maps that are widely used by analysts for discovering generic patterns and trends in various data types such as air temperatures, stock quotes, incomes, and so on. When a certain pallet is used to visually represent data, it becomes a color scale.Ī color scale is a sequence of smoothly changing colors that represent smaller and larger values.

You can use contrasting colors to represent data categories or gradients to "map" data with some intrinsic order. This tutorial will teach you how to conditionally format cells in Excel using gradient color scales to visually compare values in a range.Įxcel conditional formatting is all about visualizing data with colors.
