Conditional formatting is one of favorite features in Excel. CF has helped me save the day at work more than a dozen occasions. I almost became project manager just because I knew how to make a gantt chart in excel using conditional formatting. I have written extensively about it.
So, I was naturally curious to explore what is new in Excel 2010’s Conditional Formatting. In this post, I will share some of the coolest improvements in CF.
1. You can refer to data in other worksheets now
This is the best new addition to CF capabilities in Excel 2010. Now we can refer to data in other worksheets without using any named ranges or copying the data over to primary sheet.
2. Solid Data Bars, Finally!
In Excel 2007, MS introduced a new feature called “data bars”. It felt like an exciting thing, except for one gnawing problem. The bars have gradients. So, not only they looked ugly, but they were also difficult to read (also, they were inaccurate at default settings).
Thankfully MS rectified these problems and significantly improved data bars in Excel 2010.
Now, you can,
- Create data bars with solid fill
- Apply borders to data bars (so that even gradient fills look elegant)
- Have negative data bars
- Have an axis so that comparison is easy
Here is a small comparison between Excel 2007 & Excel 2010 Data Bars:
Using data bars to create in-cell progress charts:
You can use data bars to create in-cell progress charts (or thermo-meter charts) like this:
* Hint: The trick is to use cell background color along with data bar.
[Related: Jon Peltier has written a beautiful article reviewing data bars in Excel 2010.]
3. More Icon Sets in Conditional Formatting
Although I rarely use icons in conditional formatting, I am happy to report that MS has added 3 new sets of Icons to the conditional formatting library.
Also, you can mix and match icons depending on the rules (how I wish they didnt allow this. Mix and match can produce more evil combinations than good ones.)
What do you think about new CF Features in Excel 2010?
I am excited to try the data bars in real-world project. I find the possibility of referring to other sheets very good. Also, I am not sure if its just me, but Excel 2010 conditional formatting feels fast. In fact, not just CF, almost everything in Excel 2010 feels fast and responsive.
What about you? How are you planning to use Excel 2010 CF features in your work? Please tell us using comments.
PS: By leaving a comment, you can win a copy of Office 2010 – Home & Student Edition. Contest sponsored by Microsoft India.
References: Excel Conditional Formatting Improvements [MSDN blog]
Related: Excel 2010 – What is new? | Overview of Excel 2010 Sparklines
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.