If necessary, you can edit the range of cells affected at the bottom of the Conditions window (Figure 1).įigure 1: The Conditional Formatting window sets the kind of information to be indicated by the formatting. The Color Scale and Data Bar menu items are short-cuts to options available under Condition. All types of conditional formatting can be configured from Condition.

To use Calc’s conditional formatting, select the cells to work with, then click Format | Conditional Formatting | Condition, and select an item from the sub-menu. The automatic format can be the application of a cell style or of an indicator that visually presents data in much the same way as a graph or a chart. However, conditional formatting offers several alternatives to sparklines that provide the same visual advantages while adding some complexity to the basic idea.Ĭonditional formatting in Calc automatically changes the appearance of selected cells. Providing a straightforward and contextual look at intense evidence, sparkline graphics give us some chance to be approximately right rather than exactly wrong.Įxcel supports sparklines, but Calc does not, although some proof-of-concept macros were circulating a few years ago. And data graphics are no longer a special occasion in a separate place with a frame on some slide with a label “Fig. … vastly increase the amount of data within our eyespan and intensify statistical graphics up to the everyday routine capabilities of the human eye–brain system for reasoning about visual evidence, seeing distinctions, and making comparisons. They contain no figures, but from their shape, you can see the general trends in the data they map.Īccording to Tufte, the advantages of sparklines are that they:

Sparklines are small line graphs that fit on a line of text or a single spreadsheet cell.

In the case of conditional formatting, for instance, the format changes when the content of the involved cells changes.Ĭonditional formatting is an extension of the idea of sparklines, a concept named and popularized by data visualization theorist Edward Tufte, who devotes 20 pages to the concept in his book, Beautiful Evidence. All the three features have in common is that their appearance changes depending on context. That is where conditional formatting becomes useful in LibreOffice Calc – as a graphical summary for interpreting general trends in data at a glance, rather than studying the figures closely.Ĭontrary to first impressions, Conditional Formatting shares only part of its name with Conditional Fields or Conditional Styles in Writer. Sometimes, though, you need a summary for gathering general impressions and discerning trends. Spreadsheets are all about detailed data and its manipulation.

Openoffice conditional formatting and