Well, there’s Excel VBA that you can try. There are some tricky ways to change the appearances of scatter charts; or you may try other chart types. If you don’t like scatter chart, let me know what exactly you like it to be. About making the cell colour change based on certain conditions can be done using conditional formatting in Excel. There are many new such conditional formats available in Excel 2007. Let me know if you want something more or you can upload the file somewhere. Edit: If you know what you want to do manually, just record the macro. It will generate the code for you. You may then go and tune in to your needs. You may check these out for conditional formatting: one, two, three.