We’ll use Jim’s technique to create Harvey balls in red, yellow and green. This doesn’t work in Excel 2011 for the Mac, where number formats aren’t part of conditional formatting.
Brilliant idea, Jim, and thanks for sharing it! Then, he used those custom formats in the conditional formatting. Instead of using a formula to pull the icon into the cell, Jim created custom number formats. Last week, Jim McGarity sent me a sample file with his version of icon sets. That technique used formulas to get a symbol from a lookup table, and the cells had to be formatted in Wingding font. I showed one way to do this last year, and you can see the details here. One way to overcome this limitation is to create your own icon set. We’ll see how to create colored Harvey Balls in Excel. For example, you can show Harvey Balls (the 5 Quarters icon set), but only in black and white. However, you still can’t get all the icons in any colour. These were introduced in Excel 2007, and improved in Excel 2010. It’s easy to add conditional formatting icons in Excel, by selecting one of the built in options.
