Organizations of all kinds track their performance data in Microsoft Excel. The specific numbers are important, of course, but it’s also important that you be able to tell how the numbers relate to each other and whether your department is meeting its performance goals. Color scales and data bars show how the data in a cell compares to other data in the selected range. The higher a value is in relation to the other values in the range, the longer the data bar or the more the color is toward the high end of the scale. Icon sets, by contrast, test a value to see whether it is in the top, middle, or bottom third of the values in the range. You can change the tests to determine which icon or color is shown when.