Helpdesk Baruch College

How to Use Icon Sets to Represent Values in Microsoft Excel

If you’re trying to find an unique method to represent your information in Microsoft Excel, consider making use of symbol collections. Comparable to shade ranges, symbol collections take a series of worths and also make use of visual impacts to symbolize those values.

With a conditional formatting policy, you can present icons like traffic control, celebrities, or arrows based upon the values that you go into. As an example, you can reveal a vacant celebrity for a value of 10, a partially loaded celebrity for 30, as well as a completed filled up celebrity for 50.

This attribute is excellent for things like making use of a score system, showing completed tasks, standing for sales, or showing a change in funds.

Apply a Quick Conditional Formatting Icon Set

Like various other conditional format policies in Excel, such as highlighting leading- or bottom-ranked worths, you have some quick alternatives to select from. These consist of standard icon collections using 3, 4, or five classifications with a range of predetermined values.

Select the cells that you wish to apply the formatting to by clicking the very first cell as well as dragging your arrow with the rest.

Then, open the Home tab and go to the Styles section of the bow. Click “Conditional Formatting,” as well as move your arrow to “Icon Sets.” You’ll see those fast choices listed.

As you hover your cursor over the different Icon Sets, you can see them previewed in your spread sheet. This is an awesome means to see which set of icons works best for you.

If you detect one that you wish to make use of, just click it. This applies the conditional format rule to your chosen cells with the symbol established that you chose. As you can see in the screenshot below, we chose the celebrities from our initial instance.

Develop a Custom Conditional Formatting Icon Set

As previously mentioned, these Icon Set alternatives from the pop-out menu have actually preset values affixed. So, if you need to change the ranges to match the information in your sheet, you can develop a custom conditional format rule. As well as it’s much easier than you may assume!

Select the cells where you want to use the symbols, go to the Home tab, and choose “New Rule” from the Conditional Formatting drop-down listing.

When the New Formatting Rule home window opens up, choose “Format All Cells Based on Their Values” on top.

At the bottom of the home window, click the Format Style drop-down list as well as select “Icon Sets.” You’ll after that tailor the details for the rule.

Choose the Icon Style in the following drop-down list. Again, you can select from three, 4, or 5 categories. If you choose the icons in the contrary plan, click “Reverse Icon Order.”

A handy attribute of the Icon Sets personalized rule is that you aren’t stuck with the precise collection of symbols that you select. Listed Below that Icon Style drop-down box, you’ll see boxes for the symbols in the group. This permits you to personalize the specific icons for your regulation. So if you, as an example, intend to make use of a star, flag, as well as arrowhead rather than 3 stars, go all out!

The last part to setting up your regulation is going into the values for the array. Choose “Greater Than” (>> )or “Greater Than or Equal to” (>> =-RRB- in the very first drop-down box. Enter your worth in the following box as well as pick whether it’s a number, percent, formula, or percentile. This provides you great flexibility to establish your rule.

Now, click “OK” to apply your rule.

Another helpful function worth mentioning is that you can present the symbol just. By default, Excel shows both the symbol and the worth that you get in. But there might be instances where you intend to rely exclusively on the icon. In that case, check package for “Show Icon Only.”

Here’s an excellent example of using Icon Sets where you just intend to show the symbol.

We intend to display environment-friendly, yellow, and red traffic light symbols to suggest whether our order is new, in progress, or complete. To do so, we’ll merely get in the numbers one, 2, or 3. As you can see, the values aren’t vital in this scenario. They’re just used to set off the symbol, which is what we wish to see.

So, we do the following:

Now, all we have to perform in our sheet is kind “1” for new orders, “2” for those in progress, as well as “3” for complete orders. When we struck Enter, all we see is our environment-friendly, yellow, and also red traffic signal signs.

Ideally, this how-to for using Icon Sets in Microsoft Excel motivates you to benefit from this fantastic attribute. And for one more method to make use of conditional formatting, take a look at exactly how to produce development bars in Excel.

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