How do I - Get Ticks and Crosses in an Excel Table?

There are a few ways to get ticks and crosses in cells in Excel, the old way of doing this was to use a font, like the Wingdings, in the cell format. The only problem with this method, was that it didn't always format correctly, you had to remember the character which the corresponds to the tick and cross and if you used the spreadsheet as a data source then you would have 'strange data' in the column.

The better way of doing this in Excel 2007 is to use Conditional Formatting.

If we say that want to format a boolean, true / false column to use ticks and crosses. Firstly ensure that you use 1 for true i.e. where you want a tick and 0 for false.

Select the column and Select from the Home tab on the Excel ribbon bar, Conditional Formatting / Icon Sets and choose one of the 3 set tick sets.

What you will get is a tick and a cross next to the number.

What we now want to do is to remove the number so we are just left wit the icon.

Select the Conditional Formatting menu again and from this menu select Manage Rules...

Select the Icon set and click on Edit Rule

At the bottom of the Edit Formatting Rule dialog you will see a check box called Show Icon Only, tick this control and confirm this dialog and the rules manager dialog.

What you are then left with is just the icons :)