So who is up for an Excel challenge?
Shelly, who is an HR Manager sent this distress call last week,
First off, I LOVE your site. It is the first place I go for any excel question and I love the daily emails. I’m not sure if you answer direct emails, but I’m begging you to at least read this and let me know if I’m crazy or not (good thing you don’t know me personally :>). I’ve searched through you ‘ask an excel’ blog and I have not come close to anything I’m trying to accomplish. I’ll do my best to explain it.
I have a group of employees- lets say 100 employees.
Each employee has a performance rating attached to them.
I want to divide the group by 5%, 15%, 65%, 10%, 5% based on their performance rating.So for example how I manually do this is by running the report of employees.
I then sort the list by Performance ratings from High to Low (0.0-5.0 is our range and you can have decimals in between 0.1, 2.5, 2.3 etc.)
I then take the total number of employees and calculate the top 5%, next the 15%, then 65%, then 10%, 5% (so breaking them up into groups).
Doing this isn’t horrible, but I have to do this for each department and we are talking 700 departments. Each department is not alike- so some may have 50 employees while others may have 200+.
Is there an easier way to do this in excel??
Anytime an email starts with I Love, I am all ears. So naturally I read the entire mail. And I had to sympathize with her. 700 DEPARTMENTS?!? Can you imagine dealing with 700 departments with lots of disgruntled employees. I remember my performance evaluation & rating days back when I had a full time job. Almost everyone I knew hated their bosses during the appraisal season. And when hikes are announced, everyone (including the person with fabulous hike) would call their favorite head hunter and flirt. Aah, good old days of ratings & reviews.
But I digress.
So going back to our HR manager in distress, how would you help her?
Your challenge – highlight employees by performance rating
Here is your challenge.
- Download this file.
- It contains data & coloring rules.
- Set up conditional formatting such that you can highlight the data based on the rules
- Bonus points if you can set up conditional formatting rules such that they work on any sheet (assuming each department has their own sheet of data in same format)
- Share your rules & solution with us in comments
- Feel jolly good knowing that you are awesome in Excel.
Need some help? Check out these articles
Conditional formatting is one of my favorite features in Excel. Naturally, I want you to be awesome in it. Check out these tutorials & examples to understand how to solve this problem.
- What is conditional formatting & how to use it?
- Using formulas with conditional formatting
- Highlight top 10 performances with conditional formatting
- More on conditional formatting [more than 60 examples]
Download my solution
Now, some of you might be in same boat as Shelly. Please note that I sympathize with anyone who deals with people from 700 departments or more. But sympathy seldom solves struggle. So, go ahead and download my solution. Break it apart, examine the conditional formatting rules and fire the bottom 5% of your employees. Well, go easy on the last part 😛
Click here to download my solution.
Go ahead and share your solution
So what are you waiting for. Put on your Excel hats and get thinking. Once you have an answer, rush back to us & post it in comments. Go!
Need more challenges? Try these too
If you want more Excel challenges & homework, check out these.
17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!