Paste Harvey Balls into Excel

With Harvey Balls, you can also graph percentages in Excel. We'll show you how it's done.

The following instructions were performed with Excel 2013. In other versions, the individual options can be titled or arranged differently.

Open Excel and use the mouse to highlight any numbers (between 0 and 1) or percentages (between 0% and 100%) that you want to convert into Harvey Balls.
Then, under the "Home" tab, find the "Styles" category.
Click on the "Conditional Formatting" button and select the "Conditional Rule" or "New Rule" option.
Change the format style to "symbol sets" and select the "five quarters" for the symbol type (see picture).
Now you can make some personal adjustments. We recommend that you increase the first value for the full circle from 80 to 100. In most cases this makes more sense.
Under the "Type" column you can choose between "Percent" and "Number", depending on the format in which your initial values are available.
The button "Reverse symbol order" means that 100 &% is no longer displayed as a black circle, but as a white circle. With "Show symbol only", the numbers for the Harvey Balls are hidden.
If you click the "OK" button, the Harvey Balls are inserted in the Excel document.

Edit Harvey Balls in Excel

Rarely do you like the Harvey Balls on the first try. If you want to adjust the settings again, proceed as follows:

Select the desired cells in Excel again and click on the "Conditional Formatting" button above.
Decide on the "Manage rules" option and click on the "Edit rule" button.
If you would also like to display cells other than Harvey Balls, either write the cells in the appropriate row or click the appropriate button next to the entry (see image).

In the next practical tip, we will show you how to password-protect an Excel file.