Visualize cell values with conditional formatting(Excel 2007, 2010)

              When making reports in Excel, you may wish to highlight certain cell values by using visual aids in the worksheet.

              Select the cells whose values you want to support visually and click “Conditional Formatting” in the “Home” tab. Here, you can select from several predefined formats. These include ‘Highlight Cell Rules’, ‘Top/Bottom Rules’, ‘Data Bars’, ‘Color Scales’ and ‘Icon Sets’. Under ‘Highlight Cell Rules’, you have the option to highlight data that is greater, lesser, equal to, or between the specified values. Apart from this, you can also highlight according to text, date and duplicate values. The ‘Top/Bottom Rules’ allow you to highlight the top ten, bottom ten, above average, bottom average and even top/bottom ten based on percentage.
               For representing the data in a more appealing way, you can even make use of the ‘Data Bars’, Color Scales’ and the ‘Icon Sets’. With the help of the ‘Data Bars’ you can make use of colored data bar within the cell. Here the length of the data bar corresponds with the cell value. So higher the value, longer will be the bar. You can also make use of the ‘Color Scales’ that displays two or three color gradients in the range of the cells, where the shade represents the value. Alternatively you can make use of the various icons from the ‘Icon Sets’ to represent cell data visually.