J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Color Scales Conditional Formatting

One of the new conditional formatting options introduced in Excel 2007 is called Color Scales. It shades cells based on their value. I just posted a file in the Download section that uses this feature in a way that probably wasn't anticipated by the designers: Animated Color Scales.

A 62x62 range of cells contains formulas that are driven by three other cells. A few simple VBA macros select random colors, rescales the display, and even animates it. It's kind of fun, and you'll be amazed at some of the colorful patterns that come up.

Here are some thumbnails of what you can expect:

1. By Rick Williams. Comment posted 03 August, 2008 10:32pm

   A bug!
   
   When I downloaded this workbook, it downloaded as a .zip rather than a .xlsm!
   I tried twice - once "opening", and once "saving" to my desktop. I had to save then rename the extension to .xlsm in order to view it in Excel.
   
   Rick
2. By Rick Williams. Comment posted 03 August, 2008 10:34pm

   Oh, and I'm using IE 7.0.5730 on Win XP SP2.
3. By John Walkenbach. Comment posted 04 August, 2008 9:52am

   Thanks for pointing that out, Rick. I'm working on a fix for this.
   
   It seems that Internet Explorer is looking at the content, and making the decision to change the extension to ZIP. Office 2007 files really are ZIP files, with a non-zip extension.
4. By John Walkenbach. Comment posted 05 August, 2008 10:08am

   Problem fixed.