Simple Excel Trick to Conditionally Format Your Bar Charts

23 July 2020 Excel Charts

If you want to help your audience to make sense of your Excel chart quickly, consider color coding it. In this video I'll show you how you can apply Conditional Formatting to show different colors for positive and negative deviations. This way you can quickly create an Excel bar chart with conditional formatting based on change % or based on any logic you choose.

Comparison charts and bar graphs in Excel can be quite intimidating and force the reader to spend considerable time to make sense of them. Color can help to immediately grasp important patterns in the chart like good and bad performance. Research also shows that information that's color coded is easier understood and better retained in memory. For example if you use a column or bar chart to show deviations you can have a different color for negative values to positive values. You might choose to show the bars for negative values in red and positives values in green or any other color of your choice.

I'll show you a technique how you can apply such conditional formatting to any type of chart in Excel. As a bonus tip I'll cover how to emphasize a particular part of a chart like the maximum value by defining a logic.

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Time Stamps
00:00 Conditional formatting of charts
00:48 Setting up first bar chart
03:17 Setting up the deviation chart
05:31 Negative red, positive green
06:31 Conditional formatting of maximum value or other logic
09:32 Finalizing the charts (grouping charts together)

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