How to Create Heat Maps in Google Sheets in 3 Easy Steps

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In this article, we’ll learn how to create heat maps in Google Sheets using conditional formatting and explore options to style the heat maps.

Visualize data using heat maps
Create heat maps in Google Sheets
Customise the heat maps

Visualizing Data Using Heat Maps in Google Sheets

You can visualize your data table by creating heat maps using conditional formatting, which are graphical representations of data that utilize color-coded systems.

In this article, we will run through how you can create heat maps in Google sheets using conditional formatting.
If you follow the steps as described in this article, you will get a heat map view as shown below :

Figure 1: Heat map of the car sales made for individual days for multiple weeks

Create Heat Maps in Google Sheets in 3 Steps

Step 1: Select and prepare data

The first step is to select the dataset of interest to create the heat map of.
Keep in mind that you do not have to select the column and row headers, just select the data of interest.
Select cell B3 and drag the selection down to F9.

Figure 2: Selection of cells to create the heat map

Step 2: Insert Conditional Formatting

After selecting the cells, click on the Format button on the navigation bar.
Select Conditional Formatting.

Figure 3: Applying conditional formatting on the dataset

Step 3: Create a multicoloured heat map

Click on the Color scale tab.
Select Default to choose the colour styling you want for your heat map
On the left, you can see a bi-coloured heat map based on the min-max value of the dataset.

Figure 4: Styling the heat map using Color Scale

Figure 5: Select the colour scale you like

Styling the Heat Maps in Google Sheets using Minpoint-Maxpoint

Select the Minpoint drop-down menu and explore options.
We are using Min Number as the criteria. You can visualize the heatmap by choosing various options such as Number, and Percentile.
You can select the colour you want to assign to minimum values.