In Excel 2007 and Excel 2010, you can use icon sets in conditional formatting. There are built-in icon sets, and in Excel 2010 you can Customize Excel Conditional Formatting Icons, to some extent. Here’s how to do that, and a workaround to create icons on the worksheet instead.
Built-in Conditional Formatting Icons
There is a good selection of built-in Excel Conditional Formatting Icon sets.
For example, use Red, Yellow and Green stoplight icons, to highlight the good, average, and poor results in your sales data.
Or, choose directional arrows, with a green Up arrow, a right-pointing yellow arrow, and a red Down arrow.
Grey Directional Arrows
There are also icon sets with grey directional arrows. Those are useful for data where an increased amount is bad, instead of good. For example, your data might show counts of part failures, or customer complaints.
- Traditionally, green means “good” or “safe”, and red means “bad” or “danger”.
- There’s no setting that lets you change the icon colours
- The neutral grey arrows would be better than using a green Up arrow, for data where Up is “bad”
Or, see the section further down, with notes on how to create your own icon set, outside of the conditional formatting settings.
Limit the Colours
Rob emailed me recently, to ask how to limit the conditional formatting icons to 2 colours only, instead of the 3 or 4 default icon colours.
I am only interested in using 1 or 2 icons (a red X for “Off” and a Green light for “On” – not interested in the Yellow light). I want these icons to be triggered by a boolean (TRUE/FALSE) in another cell.
Create Your Own Icon Set in Excel 2010
Fortunately, if you’re using Excel 2010, you aren’t limited to the default icon sets – you can create your own icon sets , by mixing and matching from the available icons. (You can’t create your own icons, unfortunately, or change the look of the built-in icons.)
To create the icon set that Rob wants, I selected cells B2:B5, and set the following Formatting Rule.
- The Show Icon Only option is checked
- Green Circle icon when the value is greater than or equal to 1 (Number)
- Red X icon when the value is less than 1 and greater than or equal to 0 (Number)
- No Cell Icon when the value is less than 0
How It Works
In cell B2 there is a formula to multiply the value in cell A2 by 1:
=A2*1
That formula is copied down to cell B5.
- If the result in column A is TRUE, the formula result in column B is 1, and a green circle shows.
- If the result in column A is FALSE, the formula result in column B is 0, and a red X shows.
Get the Sample File
To get the Excel file, with the Create Your Own Icon Set example, go to the Conditional Formatting page on my Contextures site.
The zipped file is in xlsx format, and the file does not contain any macros.
Create Your Own Icon Set
If the built-in icon sets for conditional formatting don’t have what you need, you can create your own custom icons, outside of the conditional formatting settings.
See this Create Your Own Icon Set article, for the step-by-step details.
This workaround technique also works for earlier versions of Excel, where you can’t customize the icon sets, or in Excel versions where icon sets don’t exist
In this technique, you use the WingDings font, combined with conditional formatting, to show coloured symbols in the cell.
And if you’re still using Excel 2003, there are detailed instructions in this article: Conditional Formatting Icons in Excel 2003
_______________
Nice post. Although you cannot customize this in Excel 2007, i did find that if you choose the “3 Symbols (Circled)” icon set it will get pretty close. If true = 1 and False = 0, if you leave the default conditional formatting, “Green Check Mark Circled” >=67 percent and “Yellow Exclamation Point” >=33 percent, and “Red X Circle” <33 percent, you will get the desired result of a Green Circle for True and Red X (in a circle) for False.
Great post, Deb! I had not realized that Excel 2010 allowed for customization of the icon sets.
I’m using conditional formating on spreadsheet with icon sets (flags). It is working sometimes and other times in the same spreadsheet it is not working. I wanted a red flag if =>50% and yellow flag if > 20% and green flag if < 20%. The formual works in some areas and in others it doesn't.
@Patti, can you give an example of a situation where your formula isn’t working?
Also, you should change either the yellow or green flag formula to include 20%, e.g. >=20%
I have a customer who was trying to configure conditional formatting as described from Patty. Whenever we format the cells to Percentage, it doesn’t work. Nothing happens when values are changing. With numbers only it works. No difference of what value is entered. Cell and Formatting was changed to percentage.. We where even trying other options in formatting.
My experience with conditional formatting on cells with percentages is often times you can select Number instead of Percent in the conditional formatting and then enter (for example) .95 (number) as opposed to 95 (percent). It all comes down to the way that the number is actually formatting in the cell vs. how conditional formatting is setup.
FG
THANK YOU FRED!!!! I was tearing my hair out with the percentages wondering why they wouldn’t work. I changed the conditions to “number” and used decimals (.50) etc. and they work!!!! (I must have watched a dozen videos, but never saw that tip.)
You made my day!