Jo (wife) likes to watch Masterchef Australia (link), a cooking reality show every night. Even though I do not find contestant’s culinary combats comforting, occasionally I just sit and watch. You see, I like food.
The basic premise of the program is who cooks best in given time. To tell people how much time is left, they use a clock that looks like this:
The needle indicates how much time is left (much like a stop clock, with a small twist).
One day, while watching such intense battle, my mind went
- It be cool to make such a clock using hmm… Excel?
- Wouldn’t it be cool to grill a snapper & eat it than watch someone else do it
While I cannot share my snapper (or pretty much any other food item) with you, I can share my Masterchef style Excel clock with you. So behold,
Here comes the Masterchef style Clock in Excel
How is it cooked?
Don’t you worry. This recipe is not as complicated as a Masterchef recipe. With enough time & trigonometry, anyone can do it.
The clock (chart) has 2 parts. Dial & rotating hand.
While we can create both of them in one chart, I choose the path of least resistance i.e. Make one chart each for Dial & Hand and overlap them nicely.
Making the Dial
This is simpler than it looks. All we need is numbers 60 thru 5 (60,55,50…10,5) in a range & twelve 1s in another range. Then, we select both and make a radar chart. Once you adjust it, it should look like this:
Making the Rotating Hand
The hand is nothing but a line on a scatter plot with (0,0) as one point & (x,y) as another point. To calculate (x,y) we need to know how many degrees our hand should be rotated.
Hand of our clock starts at 60 and rotates clock-wise (duh!). That means if the time completed is 5, our clock’s hand should be 300 away from initial position.
Thus, x = sin(300), y = cos(300)
Same in Excel would be SIN(RADIANS(30)), COS(RADIANS(30))
For more on this calculation, refer to Spoke Chart Technique.
Running the clock (using VBA)
Our job is not done when the clock is assembled. We must give it batteries thru VBA.
The basic logic for running the clock is simple:
- When clock is running
- Check if it next second yet
- Move the hand (by modifying the value of done seconds)
- If not, just wait
You can see the code (and break it if you must) in the download file.
Download Excel Clock & Play with it
Click here to download this clock. Examine the macros assigned to the buttons. Play & Pause the clock.
Do you watch Masterchef?
Of course I am kidding. What I am really keen to know is do you make any clock / timer related things in Excel? I use timer features often to add animation, count-down features to my workbooks. They work really well.
What about you? Have you used such techniques? What is your experience? Please share using comments.
PS: If you must know, I prefer Amazing Race to Masterchef. I guess I get more pleasure watching people run around globe than run around in a kitchen.
More Charting Recipes
If you like a well cooked chart, we have got one too many in our pantry. Check out,
- Spoke chart in Excel
- Grammy bump chart
- Competitive Analysis Chart
- Polar Clock in Excel
- Data around the clock
Or consider joining my Excel School program to cook fine Excel workbooks & charts. Click here.
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!