This post is part of our spreadcheats series – 30 Excel and Charting Tips & Hacks aimed to make day to day spreadsheeting fun and productive.
One of the most common charts is “YoY Growth Rates of Our Superawesomekickass Product”. While not everyone may have a superawesomekickass product, most of us in fact make a YoY (Year on Year) growth rate charts for various types of data.
A simple label formatting hack can improve the effectiveness of these charts by adding color to differentiate positive vs. negative growth (or mediocre vs. sky rocketing growth rates). See this example:
You can get this effect by applying custom number formatting to the data label. It is one of my favorite tricks in excel and I have written about it in introduction to custom cell formatting in excel, number formatting in excel using custom codes, showing decimal values only when needed articles.
How you can get colors in Axis Labels
First apply data labels to your chart and now select the data labels and press ctrl+1 (aww, come on now, you are reading this blog, you should what ctrl+1 means) and go to numbers tab. Select “custom” as category and specify the formatting code like this:
[blue]+0%;[red]-0%
Now, that was easy, isn’t it. But you might think, “Chandoo, what the heck the above format code is doing?”
Well, it tells excel to apply red color and add a minus symbol if the data label value is less than zero and apply blue color and add + symbol if the value is above zero. You see the custom number formatting codes have 3 parts in them, like this:
formatting for positive numbers ; formatting for negative numbers ; formatting for zero values
If you are noob (hi noob!) and lost in all these codes and square brackets, you may want to checkout our post on introduction to number formatting in excel to learn more about custom codes.
Ok, that was fun, What else you can do?
You can do much more using custom codes to format data labels. For example, a code like [Red][<0.15]0%;[Blue][>=0.15]0%; will, Oh, forget it, you can guess that. Just remember that excel allows only 3 parts in custom codes. So go nuts, but just thrice.
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6 Responses to “A quick personal update”
Thank you for the personal update. It was quite encouraging and a breath of fresh air in my Inbox. Take care and stay safe.
David
Doctors advise:
Virus obstructs lungs with thick mucus that solidifies.
Consume lot hot liquids like tea, soup, and sip of hot liquid every 20 min
Gargle w antiseptic of lemon, vinegar, & hot water daily
It attaches to hair/clothes detergent kills it, when come from st go straight shower
Hang dirty clothes in sunlight/cold overnight or wash immediately.
Wash metal surfaces as it can live on them 9 days
Do not touch hand rails
Do not smoke
Wash hands foaming 20 sec every 20 min
Eat fruit/veg and up zinc levels.
Animals do not spread it
Avoid common flu
Avoid eat/drink cold things
If feel sore throat do above immediate as virus is there 3-4 days before descends into lungs
Would love help with my database mgt in excel.
Thanks for being thoughtful of us.
BTW How do you track your expenses/income in excel? Can you share the worksheet please.
Stay safe you and your family, best wishes.
Thanks for the update and happy to know that you and family are doing good. A 21 day lockdown has now been announced in India (I live around Kolkata) so it's uncertain times ahead. I check up on your wonderful articles often and will do so even more regularly now. Stay safe and God bless.
Hi from Argentina, I follow you for a lot of years now. We here are in a quarantine for 2 or 3 weeks, because the pandemia.
Excel is also my passion and I came here looking for a Num2Words formula, but in spanish. If anyone have it, please let me know.
Best regards.
Pablo Molina
La Rioja - Argentina
I'm glad to have your personal update. I'm from India & following you for so many years. Cheers to have any further personal update.