How to add Icons in your cells to enhance your result in Excel? It's very easy
When to add icons to your cells?
To make your data more understandable in relationship to each other, you can add
- Color scales
- Icon sets
But there is a big difference of use between these 2 tools.
- The color scale is dedicated to a range of cells with many rows and many columns.
- The icon sets are useful with data in only one column.
Example: Balance of the stock
In this example, you have a variation of the stock of your products between 2 months. At first glance, it's not easy to see which values are positive or negative and what is the maximum and minimum.
In this situation, the addition of icons in the cells will help for a better understanding.
How do you add icons in the cells according to the value?
We can easily add an icon set into our cells with the conditional formatting
- Select your range of cells (D3:D10 in our example).
- Select the menu Conditional Formatting > Icon Sets.
- Select one of the icon sets (here 3 directional icons)
Immediately, icons are displayed in your cells according to the values of the range.
Automatically, Excel is able to find the minimum and the maximum. Then, it will build a rule to apply the icons according to the rule of 33%
- First 33%, the green icon
- Second 33%, the yellow icon
- Third 33%, the red icon
Customize the display rule for each icon
By default, the distribution of icons is done by third (for 3 icons) or by quarter (for 4 icons).
You can change the default rule and customize the icon set application like this.
- Open the menu Manage Rules from the ribbon (Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules)
- Then, you select the rule you want to customize but WATCH OUT! It's really important to select the option This Workbook.
- Then, you click on Edit Rule ...
- The following dialog box shows the standard icon rules (33% for each icon).
- Now, you can set your own rule like this one
- greater than 50, a green icon
- between -50 and 49, a yellow icon
- In other situations, which means under -50, the red icon
And once you apply your new rule, you can see that some cells have a new icon 👍
So, as you can see, it's very easy in Excel to add icons to your cells.