Microsoft Excel 12

Microsoft Excel

Wrapping up new visualizations – icon sets
posted Sunday, October 09, 2005 9:46 PM by David Gainer

The final visualization that we added to Excel 12 has the working title “icon sets”. As the name implies, this feature allows users to put icons in cells based on the values of the cell. These are in some ways similar to data bars and colour scales, so much of what I have covered in previous posts (here and here) applies to icon sets as well. The key difference is that users can specify a number of categories for their data (between 3 and 5 categories), choose a set of icons that they want to appear in the cells for each category, and Excel determines the categorization of each cell relative to all cells in the selected range and draws the appropriate icon in the each of the cells. This is very effective when you are trying to annotate and present data in a way that is quickly readable and comprehensible.