Using gradients in Excel is not just to make your spreadsheet pretty. This type of conditional formatting makes it easy to see correlations and meaning in your data. You can see that put to use in my article on RAM Latency VS Clock Speed. In this followup article, I show exactly how that gradient was created.
It is hard to believe that Excel still doesn't have the built-in ability to display a cell split diagonally with independent labels in each half. There are several ways to solve this manually but with issues. The two main issues are that resizing cells can mess up some solutions and most solutions do not allow you to color each half independently.
This article demonstrates two complete solutions - one is an add-in that I built and the other is a manual process to do the same thing.
