If you’re like most people, you probably use Excel to track your progress on projects. You might have a column that shows how much work you’ve done so far, or a bar that updates as you work. But what if you want to show different things depending on how much work is left? You can do this with conditional formatting. First, create a column in your spreadsheet that will hold the progress information. Next, create two columns: one for the total amount of work done so far and one for the remaining amount of work. In the conditional formatting column, add a condition that checks the value in the “Total Work Done” column and sets the color of the bar to green if it’s less than half-way finished, yellow if it’s between half-and-half and three-quarters finished, and red if it’s more than three-quarters finished. Now all you have to do is update your bars as you go! Just change the condition in the conditional formatting column and hit “Update.” The bars will update automatically as you finish working on them. ..
Progress bars are pretty much ubiquitous these days; we’ve even seen them on some water coolers. A progress bar provides instant feedback on a given process, so why not bring some of that graphical pizzazz into your spreadsheet, using Excel’s Conditional Formatting feature?
Progress Bars in Excel 2010
“Bar-type” conditional formatting has been around since Excel 2007. But Excel 2007 would only make bars with a gradient – the bar would get paler and paler towards the end, so even at 100% it wouldn’t really look like 100%. Excel 2010 addresses this by adding Solid Fill bars that maintain one color all throughout. These are ideal for creating progress bars.
Creating The Bar
The first thing you have to do is enter a numeric value into the cell you’d like to format. You can either enter the value directly or use a formula. In our case I’ll just type it in.
Note how I made the column wider; you don’t necessarily have to do this, but it does help make the bar look more like a “bar” (and not just a colored cell).
Now click Conditional Formatting, select Data Bars and click More Rules.
In the New Formatting Rule dialog check the box that says Show Bar Only (so the number doesn’t appear in the cell). Under Minimum and Maximum, select Type as Number. Then, set the Value to the minimum (beginning) value of your scale and maximum (the top of your bar, the end of the process). We’ll just go for 0 and 100, but you could set this to anything that works for you.
Now let’s configure the Bar Appearance. Make sure the Fill is Solid Fill and select the color you’d like to use. When you’re done, the dialog should look similar to this:
Now click OK, and you’re done! At this point you should have a beautiful, crisp progress bar adorning your spreadsheet.
