Stop Reading Numbers! How to Use Excel Color Scales to Spot Trends Instantly Stop Reading Numbers! How to Use Excel Color Scales to Spot Trends Instantly The human brain processes color 60,000 times faster than text. If you are still reading raw numbers in your spreadsheets, you are working in slow motion. We have all been there. You open a spreadsheet with 50 columns and 1,000 rows. It is just a wall of black and white text. You are trying to find the highest sales region or the lowest performing product, but your eyes start to glaze over. This is called Data Blindness . When everything looks the same, nothing stands out. The solution is not to create a pivot table (yet). The solution is to turn your table into a Heatmap using Excel's built-in Color Scales. This technique allows you to "see" the story your data is telling before you even read a single digit. ...