Excel conditional formatting is a hidden and powerful gem that when used well, can change the outlook of your project report / sales budget / project plan or analytical outputs from bunch of raw data in default fonts to something truly professional and good looking. Better still, you dont even need to be a guru or excel pro to achieve dramatic results. All you need is some coffee and this post to learn some cool conditional formatting tricks.
So you got your coffee mug? well, lets start!
The 5 tricks we are going to learn are,
1. Highlighting alternative rows / columns in tables
2. No-nonsense project plans / gantt charts
3. Extreme Incell graphs
4. Highlight mistakes, errors, omissions, repetitions
5. Create intuitive dashboards
If you are new to Excel Conditional Formatting, please read the Conditional Formatting Basics article before proceeding.
I have created an excel sheet containing all these examples. Feel free to download the excel and be a conditional formatting rock star
1. Highlighting alternative rows / columns in tables:
Often when you present data in a large table it looks monotonous and is difficult to read. This is because your eyes start interpreting the data as grid instead of some important numbers. To break this you try highlighting or changing the background color of alternative rows / columns. But how would you do this if you have rather large table and it keeps changing. The trick lies in Conditional Formatting. (Of course you can use the built-in auto format feature, but we all know how the default settings of various Microsoft products are like).
- First select data part of the table you want to format.
- Go to Conditional formatting dialog (Menu > Format > Conditional Formatting)
- Change the “cell value is” to “formula is” (YES, you can base your formatting outcome on formulas instead of cell values)
- Now, if you want to highlight alternative rows, the formula can go something like this,
=MOD(ROW(),2)=0
which means, whenever row() of the current cell is even, to change the coloring to odd rows, you just need to put =MOD(ROW(),2)=1 as formula
Also, if you want to highlight alternative columns instead of rows you can use the column() formula.
What if you want to change background color of every 3rd row instead, just use =MOD(ROW(),3)=0 instead. Just use your imagination.
- Set the format as you like, in my case I have used yellow color. When you are done, the dialog should look something like this:
- Click OK.
- Congratulations, you have mastered a conditional formatting trick now 🙂
2. Creating a quick project plan / gantt chart using conditional formatting:
Project plans / gantt charts are everyday activity in most of our lives. Creating a simple and snazzy project plan template in excel is not a difficult job, using conditional formatting a bit of formulas you can do it no time.
- First create a table structure like shown above, with columns like Activity, start and end day, day 1, 2,3, etc…
- Now, whenever a day falls between start and end day for a corresponding activity, we need to highlight that row. For that we need to identify whether a day falls between start and end. We can do that with the below formulas,
=IF(AND(F$8>=$D9, F$8<=$E9),"1","")
Which means, whenever, the day number represented on the top row is between start and end we will in 1 in the corresponding cell.
- Next, whenever the cell value is 1, we will just fill the cell with a favorite color and change the font to same color, so that we dont see anything but a highlighted cell, better still, whenever you change the start or end dates, the color will change automatically. This will be done by conditional formatting like below:
- Congratulations, you have mastered the art of creating excel gantt charts now
3. Extreme In-cell Graphs:
Incell graphing is a nifty trick that basically uses REPT() function (used to repeat a string, character given number of times) to generate bar-charts with in a cell. You can apply conditional formatting on top of them to give the charts a good effect. Here is a sample:
The above is a table of visits to Chandoo.org 😉 in the month of January 2008. As you can see I have highlighted (by changing the font color to red and making it bold) for the cells that have more than average number of visits in the month. I am not going to tell you how to do it, it is your home work 🙂
4. Highlight mistakes / errors / omissions / repetitions using conditional formatting:
Often we will do highly monotonous job like typing data in a sheet. Since the work is monotonous you tend to make mistakes, omit a few or repeat something etc. This can be avoided by conditional formatting. I use this trick whenever I am typing something or pasting a formula over a rather large range of cells (for eg. vlookup on annual revenue data of all your accounts, could run in to thousands of rows across multiple states /regions etc.).
Lets see how you can highlight a cell when it has an error:
- First select the cells that you want to search for errors
- Next go to menu > format > conditional formatting and mention the formula as:
=iserror()(see below)
- In the same way you track repetitions, a simple
countif()would do the magic for you, or Omissions (again a countif()) - Thats it, you have learned how to save tons of time by letting excel do the job for you. Sit back and sip that coffee before it gets cold.
5. Creating dash boards using excel conditional formatting:
As I said before you can use conditional formatting to create intuitive sales reports or analytics outputs. Like the one shown here,
Here is how you can do it:
- Copy your data table to a new table.
- Empty the data part and replace it with formula that can go like this (I am using the above table format to write these formulas, may change for your data)
=ROUND(C10,0) & " " & IF(C9 Essentially, what we are doing is, whenever the cell value is more than its predecessor in the data table we are appending the symbol â–² (go to menu > insert > symbols and look for the above one) etc.
- Next, conditionally change the color of cell to red / green / blue or pink (if you want 😉 ) and you are done
- Show it to your boss, bask in the glory 🙂
I have created an excel sheet containing all these examples. Feel free to download the excel and be a conditional formatting rock star.
More DIY Excel Training:
» Excel for Beginners – Tutorials
» Excel Formula Examples
» Pivot Tables
» Project Management using Excel
» Excel Dashboards
» Advanced Excel
31 Responses to “Beautiful Budget vs. Actual chart to make your boss love you”
Would be considerably easier just to have a table with the variance shown.
On Step 3, how do you "Add budget and actual values to the chart again"?
There are a few ways to do it.
Easy:
1) Copy just the numbers from both columns (Select, CTRL+C)
2) Select the chart and hit CTRL+V to paste. This adds them to chart.
Traditional:
1) Right click on chart and go to "select data..."
2) From the dialog, click on "Add" button and add one series at a time.
One more way to accomplish it is just select the columns into chart. Press Ctrl+C and then press Ctrl+V
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work for me in Excel 2010. The "Var 1" and "Var 2" columns cannot combine two fonts to display the symbol and the figure side-by-side.
Secondly, there is no option to Click on “Value from cells” option when formatting the label options. The only options provided are Series Name, Category Name or Value.
@TheQ47... the emoji font also has normal English letters, so if you use that font, then you should be ok. I am assuming your computer doesn't have that font or hasn't been upgraded for emoji support.
Reg. Excel 2010, you can manually link each label to a cell value. Just select one label at a time (click on labels, wait a second, click on an individual label) and press = and link it to the label var 1 or var 2.
I am using excel 2010, please explain how to apply Step 12
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Neeraj,
"Value from cells" option is only available in Excel 2013 or above. In older versions, you have to manually adjust the label value by linking each label seperately.
Read this please: https://chandoo.org/wp/change-data-labels-in-charts/
Sir, you are just awesome.
Your creativity has no limit.
Regards
Neeraj Kumar Agarwal
Hi Chandoo,
I just found your website, and really love it. It helps me a lot to be an Excel expert 😉
Currently I am facing with a problem at step 11:
Var1 Var2
D30%
A5%
B0%
B4%
B7%
C10%
C13%
D27%
I42%
Though at mapping table, I used windings, here formula uses calibra. How I can change it? I am able to change only the whole cell. In this case numbers will be Windings too.
Thanks for your help!
Hi Mariann... Welcome to Chandoo.org and thanks for your comment.
If you wanted to use symbols from wingdings and combine them with % numbers, then you need to setup two labels. One with symbol, in wingdings font and another with value in normal font. Just add the same series again to the chart, make it invisible, add labels. You may need to adjust the alignment / position of label so everything is visible.
[…] firs article explains how you can enhance your charts with symbols. You can simply insert any supported symbol into your data and charts. To some extend you can […]
You're a good person, thank you to share your knowledge with us, I will try to do in my work
Great visualization of variance. My question is that is this possible in powerbi?
How would you go about it?
HELLO, WHY CANT I FIND VALUES FOR LABELS IN EXCEL 2013
Dear chanddo sir,
What to do if we have dynamic range for Chart. How this will work. can you able to make the same thing works on dynamic range.
Sir Chandoo,
Good Day!
First, I'd like to say that I am very grateful for your work and for sharing all these things with us.
I tried to do this chart but it seems that the symbols don't work with text (abs(var%),"0%") unless we keep the Windings font style.
The problem is, it converts the text into symbol as well and you wont see the 0% anymore. I'm using Windows 7.
WOW - Segoe UI Emoji
This is the greatest discovery for me this month 🙂 Thanks for sharing.
Here's my two-cents:
https://wmfexcel.com/2019/02/17/a-compelling-chart-in-three-minutes/
Sir This is awesome chart, and very easy to made because of your way to explain is very simple , everyone can do. Thank you
one problem i am facing, I hv made this chart , but when i am inserting data table to chart it is showing two times , how can i resolve this
in this chart when i am adding new month data for example first i made this chart jan to mar but when i add data for the apr month graphs updated automatically but labels are missing for that new month
Hi Renuka,
Please make sure the formulas for labels are also calculated for extra months. Just drag down the series and set label range to appropriate address.
So I am playing with the Actual chart here - but amounts are bigger than your - you have 600 as Budget - my budget is 104,000 - is there a way to shorten that I am unaware of
thank you - I LOVE YOUR SITE
Thanks for the tips and tricks on Excel. In the Planned versus Actual chart examples, you use multiple values (ex. multiple Categories in above). How can this be done when we have only 1 set of values? For example if I have only this:
Planned Actual
SOW Budget 417480 367551
How can I create a single bar chart like the one above?
Thank you Chandoo.
This one is just perfect for my Quarterly Review presentation on Operational Budget against Actual Performance for the Hospital I'm currently working with.
Just Subscribed today (10 minutes ago)
Is there a way to make the table of data into a pivot table to be able to add a slicer for the graph due to many different categories and months?
Hi, I tried to modify you template with something appropriate for me, and I found a problem. this template was modified by me started with excel 2010, then 2016 and finally 2019. Same thing - somehow appear an error - or didn't show the emoticons for positive percentage or doubled the emoticons for some rows. I suspect to be from excel. if is need it I can sand you my xlsx for study. Please help if you can.
Hi Chandoo,
Could you please check the Var Formula in Step1. You have mentioned budget-actual and when i did this i got different values but when reversed like actual-budget i got the actual value what you have demonstrated in step1.
Please share your view.
This is a great chart (budget vs. actual). However, in trying recreate it, I cannot color in the UP Down bars individually, and they all become formatted with the same color. I'm using Office 365. Look forward to the feedback.
Thanks.
Dan
pls explain in detail step 7
While in the Excel sheet you have used following formula for Var
Var = Actual - Budget
But
in the note, you have written
Var = Budget - Actual
Good Presentation and Data information.thank you so much chandoo.