Spotting trends in large volumes of data can be tricky! Thankfully Office 2007 introduces a feature that allows you to format columns of data according to their value, allowing you to see at a glance the distribution of data and any significant outliers!

Excel in-cell bar graph

Illustrated here is a sample of data in two columns. To visualise the data in the second column:

1. Select the contents of the column
2. Select the “Home” tab in Excel 2007
3. Click “Conditional formatting”
4. Click “Data bars”
5. Select a colour scheme to suit your taste!

The visualisation will appear as illustrated! Helpful huh?

You can customise the colours and rules by which the cells are formatted by clicking the “More Rules..” button in the data bars menu.

If you don’t have Excel 2007 – not to worry! There is a work around for previous versions of excel, one of which can be found here:

http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/lightweight-data-exploration-in-excel/