Color Scale is a powerful tool in Conditional Formatting in Excel. This guide will show you how to create and use it effectively.
What is a Color Scale?
A color scale is useful for comparing sales data across months, spotting team performance trends, or identifying temperature changes in weather data. It visually highlights high and low values in a data range, like with a distance table, helping you make quick decisions.
In this Excel example, a color scale shows different salary amounts based on "Study / Experience" levels. The colors make it easy to see salary changes.
Here’s how to understand this document:
- Green Shades: These show the lowest salaries. Dark green means a lower salary, and it turns lighter as the salary gets higher.
- Yellow Shades: Middle-range salaries are shown in yellow. Yellow is a transition color between the lower green values and the higher red values.
- Red Shades: These show the highest salaries. Dark red means a higher salary, with the color becoming lighter as the salary decreases.
The colors move smoothly from green to yellow to red, helping you see how salaries increase with more experience and study. This color scale is useful for spotting patterns, like salary growth with experience or noticing any unusual changes in salary.
How to Apply a Color Scale to Your Data
- Select the data range you want to format.
- Go to Conditional Formatting > Color Scales in the menu.
- Select one the option in the menu
Excel automatically shades each cell based on value, from green (low) to red (high).
- The color gradient shows data range, from minimum to maximum.
- Yellow highlights the middle value in the range.
Related Articles
This tool is especially useful in a Distance Table between cities, helping you find the shortest or longest distances quickly.