Data Visualization Taken to the NEXT LEVEL: Dynamic Data Bars in Excel

Introduction

In this post, I’ll show you how to create a simple visualization in Excel that you see above, and it’ll only take a couple steps! It’s basically a bar chart that’s actually INSIDE the cell. And in the end, I’ll provide you with a video that will provide a more detailed walkthrough, so make sure to keep reading till then!

Conditional Formatting to Add the Data Bar

So over here, I just have a simple table with all the months and the profits:

First, you have to highlight all the numbers and go to the conditional formatting tool:

What conditional formatting will do is take in all the numerical values and automatically create data bars based on what those values are.

So, after you click on that button, it’s gonna open a menu. From that menu, click on “Data Bars” and select on the color scales that you like the best!

Personally, I prefer the green color style, so I selected that one.

From my screen, you can see that the green bars represent the months where we made a profit, whereas the red bars represent months where we lost money. So, these data bars are a nice way of quickly gaining insights from your data.

Data Bar on a Separate Cell

But I wanna do one more thing.

I don’t like how the data bars are overlapping with the numbers. What I’m gonna do is move all these data bars onto a separate column.

This will require a couple more steps, but it’s still very easy to do! If you want to see me do this, then check out this short video that I made:

I hope to see you over there, and thank you for reading this post!