Harvey Balls for Office Documents

If you’ve been around for a while and/or you subscribe to Consumer Reports Magazine, you know what Harvey Balls are.  They are little circles with varying amounts filled in which can be used to represent a level of completeness, sophistication, match to a standard, etc.  They are a good replacement for numerical scales in many cases because they give a very quick visual cue.  Many people can scan a list with Harvey Balls and zero in on something they want faster than they can with numeric representations.

image

Today I wanted to put some Harvey Balls into a PowerPoint presentation, so I Binged “Office 2007 Harvey Balls” and found that a kind soul named Alastair Bor had created a Harvey Ball font for use with Office.  Having built these little beasties from scratch a few times over the years, I was very glad to have such a simple solution, so I thought I’d share it.  By formatting the numbers 0-9 with the Harvey Ball font, you get the nice Harvey Balls above.

 

Want to see how you can show Harvey Balls using a Display Template in SharePoint 2013? See my post Harvey Balls Redux – Display Templates for Site Columns by Dave Paylor.

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7 Comments

    1. monika:

      It’s amazing how many hits I get on this old blog post. The font approach is nice for simple stuff, but if you want to have a full 1%-100% range of reusable images, you’ll probably want to look at other solutions, as you intimate. I haven’t had to go further than the font approach in years, though I do recall building my own Harvey Balls many times long ago.

      M.

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