Let's start by just looking at June sales again, so

let's highlight all of June sales.

And then go to Conditional Formatting and Color Scales.

And then let's choose the top left one which is Green, Yellow, Red.

This is the type of heat map that shows us where values fall in a range.

Greens are highest values in the range and red are lowest.

And the yellows and oranges are more mid-range values.

You could also reverse it to show red is highest and

green is lowest by choosing the second options.

I'll hover over the rest of the options here, so

you can see the different color options you have for Color Scales.

This is a good way to quickly see how each state sales fall in the range for June.

We can also choose the entire dataset and look at it for all months.

To do that we would just need to clear the rule.

And then select all the values.

And then go back to Conditional Formatting, Color Scales,

and let's choose top left option again.

Now this gives us a good visual of the monthly sales by state, and

how each value falls in the overall range.

You may notice quite a bit of red here, so it looks like total sales for

June are probably down.

Let's add a total down here and see if that's true.

Key in Total here, and then click on the AutoSum function.

And make sure it's including the correct data.

And it looks like it is, so now lets hit Enter, and copy this over through June.

There, you can see our assumptions were correct.

June sales of 716,068 are the lowest of the year so far.

Now let's clear that rule and say we just want to look at how Georgia

sales are trending for the first half of the year.

Highlight the row with Georgia sales and then go back to Conditional Formatting,

Color Scales, and then the top left option again.

It's my favorite if you can't tell, just makes sense to me when looking at

sales data to show highest numbers as green and lowest as red.

Now we can see that February was Georgia's best month and June is the worst.

All right, let's clear that rule, now let's look at icon sets.

I use icon sets a lot when looking at variances or comparing data.

For instance, changes in month over month sales.

Let's add a formula here at the bottom of our data to show monthly change in total

sales.

Let's type Monthly Change here, and then since we don't have the data for

December in here.

The first monthly change we can calculate is January to February.

Let's add a formula here starting in February by typing = and

then selecting February total minus January total.

And then let's copy this across.

Now you can see sales were up from January to February, but

down each month after that.

Let's try adding an icon to help us visualize by selecting the row that shows

month over month change in sales.

And then go up to Conditional Formatting, Icon Set, and

then you can see all of the different display options here.

Let's choose the arrows with the colors,

now you can easily see sales are up from January to February.

And down for the remaining months, but

you may notice February to March is showing as yellow instead of red.

You would think this would be red since the negative, so let's figure out why

it's showing yellow by going up to Conditional Formatting in Manage Rules,

and then go to Edit Rules.

And you'll see the rules here,

which we are saying if the value falls in the top 33% of the range then it's green.

If it's bottom 33% then it's red, and if it's in between those it's yellow.

You can change these to whatever percentages you can prefer, or

even change it to numbers instead of percentages.

And put zeros for both if you never want to see yellow.

There's several other variations for rules that you can get by selecting New Rule or

Manage Rule to adjust any other rules you have selected.

But there's not enough time to go through each variation, so

I'll leave that up to you to explore on your own.