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About this lesson
Adding stoplights, check marks, flags and other icons to your Dashboard.
Exercise files
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Icon Sets.xlsx48.5 KB Icon Sets - Completed.xlsx
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Quick reference
Icon Sets
Adding bling to your dashboards with Icon Sets.
When to use
Use to add symbols and icons to your dashboard which will dynamically update when the data changes.
Instructions
Creating Icon Sets
- Select your data and go to the Home tab --> Conditional Formatting --> Icon Sets
- Choose the Icon set you find most attractive
Modifying Icon Sets
- Select any cell that holds the icon set
- Go to the Home tab --> Conditional Formatting --> Manage Rules
- Select your rule --> Edit
- Make your modifications
Hints & tips
- Icon sets default to rules for the top, middle and bottom thirds of your data set. You can change to use values or percentiles as needed
- When modifying a rule you can pick icons from different data sets to make your own
- Unfortunately, you are restricted to the icons provided, and cannot upload your own
- 00:04 In this module we are going to start applying some techniques to one of
- 00:08 the dashboards that we're building in this course.
- 00:11 And this one's gonna focus on working with icon sets.
- 00:14 You'll notice we have a nice little summary table here.
- 00:17 It's got a beautiful little piece of data bars on here to show that tents
- 00:21 are the largest product line that we have.
- 00:23 But what I'd like to focus on right now is putting some indicators
- 00:26 on the variance to see how these actually look.
- 00:29 Highlighting them with a little bit of eye candy to let us know if they're
- 00:33 good or bad.
- 00:33 Now what we're gonna start with is we're gonna build a traffic light rule for this.
- 00:37 So we're gonna go to Conditional Formatting, we're gonna go to Icon Sets.
- 00:41 And we have a few under the shapes for different things.
- 00:45 I'm gonna pick the second rule with the three signs, again,
- 00:48 trying to be sensitive to color-blindness issues here for red green.
- 00:52 This way at least we have different shapes.
- 00:55 So we're gonna say OK to this.
- 00:57 And what you'll notice is that it puts a rule on for variance.
- 00:59 Now this is okay but it's not ideal.
- 01:03 The negative 2172 has the red indicator.
- 01:06 That makes sense, it's really negative.
- 01:09 The positive values, 1,698 and 1,031, are showing green.
- 01:13 But then I've got two yellow values, 212 negative and 345 positive.
- 01:19 This is a variance to budget.
- 01:21 If the variance is greater than 0,
- 01:23 it needs to be green because that's a good thing.
- 01:26 If it's yellow, well I never expect to exactly hit budget,
- 01:29 we're trying to be within a range.
- 01:31 We try to budget aggressively as an inspiration to get people there.
- 01:35 So really, I'm kinda looking at going well, yellow,
- 01:38 mediocre performance is let's say that if it's less than $500, that's really bad.
- 01:44 If it's between 0 and negative 500, that's where I actually want to see yellow.
- 01:48 So I need to modify this rule.
- 01:50 So I'm gonna go in and I'm going to highlight the rule,
- 01:55 go to Conditional Formatting > Manage rules.
- 01:58 We'll select our Icon Set and say Edit.
- 02:01 And in here you'll notice that the rule is set up based on percentages.
- 02:06 Now every time you create a different conditional formatting rule it
- 02:08 starts this way.
- 02:09 So if it's between 0 and 33%,
- 02:12 it's gonna give it of the items that are in this dataset, then it'll give it red.
- 02:18 If it's between 33 and 67% of whatever that range is then yellow.
- 02:21 67% or higher and it's gonna be green.
- 02:24 I need to change this so that it's based on values.
- 02:27 So we'll say type number, type number.
- 02:31 Now when the rule tells me if it's greater than or equal to 0 it'll go green,
- 02:36 I really want it to be only greater than 0 is green.
- 02:40 Less than or equal to 0, where do I want this to be?
- 02:43 Well I actually want it to be greater than or equal to negative 500.
- 02:49 That way if it's negative, it's greater than this value but less than 0,
- 02:52 so it'll give me a yellow rule.
- 02:54 And if it's less than -500 it will be red.
- 02:57 And now when we say OK and we say OK again, you'll notice the rule updates and
- 03:02 my 345, which is positive, is now showing in green.
- 03:06 That's great.
- 03:08 One challenge I have with this though.
- 03:10 These traffic lights because they're aligned to the left-hand side of the cell,
- 03:13 they look like they're actually applicable to budget and they're not.
- 03:16 They're applicable to the variance.
- 03:18 But there's no way to align our icon sets to the right.
- 03:22 So I'm gonna show you a quick little trick here to make that work.
- 03:25 We're gonna insert a new column and then what we're gonna
- 03:31 do is we're gonna say =, the ell to the left, Enter.
- 03:35 And I'm actually going to go and apply this to all the same cells by pressing F2.
- 03:40 And I'm gonna hold down my Ctrl key and press Enter and
- 03:42 that will commit everything to the same spot.
- 03:44 Now it inherits the conditional formats.
- 03:46 If it doesn't, you can copy and paste the conditional format rules.
- 03:49 The key part that I do want to do now, I'm gonna highlight this.
- 03:53 We're gonna clear the rules from these cells.
- 03:57 And now I'm gonna modify this rule.
- 04:02 Go to Conditional Formatting > manage rules, we're gonna edit it.
- 04:07 We're gonna check the box to show icon only.
- 04:10 And what you'll see is the values disappear.
- 04:13 I can now shorten this guy out quite nicely.
- 04:17 Cool, now what I'm gonna do now is I'm also going to
- 04:21 copy the format of my % of target and
- 04:25 say = the cell to the left, Ctrl+Enter to commit these.
- 04:30 And we're gonna set up a conditional formatting rule for this guy as well.
- 04:34 This rule though will start with an icon set, and we're gonna go with
- 04:40 these green and red check marks and Xs but I'm again gonna modify this one.
- 04:45 I'm gonna manage this rule and edit.
- 04:50 Once again I'm gonna set this to a value set of rules.
- 04:57 For this one, my value is gonna be if I'm greater than 1,
- 05:02 it's gonna be a green check mark.
- 05:04 If I'm greater than or equal to 95%,
- 05:07 I don't want a green check mark this time, I want something different.
- 05:11 So I'm gonna click on this little guy here and I'm gonna choose this yellow line.
- 05:17 So I can modify and pick different items.
- 05:19 What I can't do unfortunately is change the colors or change the directions.
- 05:23 I can't have a red arrow that goes up or a green arrow that goes down.
- 05:26 What I see here I'm stuck with unfortunately.
- 05:29 But when I do this and click show cell icon only, you'll notice that I
- 05:33 get a nice custom rule that actually lines up nicely for my % of target.
- 05:38 Which I can shrink down and nobody knows the difference.
- 05:41 Everything looks good.
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