What are conditional formatting icon sets and where can it be utilized best?

Dear Sir, == Conditional formatting in an Excel worksheet is a built-in feature on the Home tab of the Excel ribbon.
Excel’s conditional formatting feature can do a whole lot more than many people realize, like formatting, such as currency, alignment, and color, determines how Excel displays a value.
== Conditional formatting is more flexible, applying specified formatting only when certain conditions are met.
In Excel2007 and2010, Conditional Formatting is in the Styles group on the Home tab.
In Excel2003, Conditional Formatting is on the Format menu.
Here are some creative ways you can push conditional formatting beyond its expected uses: =1= Highlight Cell Rules: - This option is used to format your data based on the contents of the cells in a data set — either a single column or row or an entire table.
You have seven built-in options under Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cell Rules: (Greater Than -- Less Than -- Between --- Equal To -- Text That Contains --- A Date Occurring --- and Duplicate Values) -Greater than and Less than options to show values over time, like rank reports, month-over-month revenue, year-over-year visits, etc., this can be achieved by formatting values that move in a negative direction with color font and those that move in a positive direction with another color font.
- Text that contains option is particularly useful for tasks like highlighting keywords that contain a certain word, landing pages from a particular directory, etc.
- Duplicate values is useful in downloading a Screaming Frog report to highlight duplicate content.
An alphabetical sort will put all the duplicates at the top of the column and groups the pages with the same hash value together.
=2= Top/Bottom Rules: - When two or more conditional formatting rules apply to a range of cells, these rules are evaluated in order of precedence.
Excel gives you six built-in rules: ( Top10 Items -- Top10% -- Bottom10 Items -- Bottom10% -- Above Average -- and Below Average).
Of course, you’re not limited to these rules.
If you select More Rules, you can set your own thresholds.
=3= Data Bars: - it is the easiest way to get started with conditional formatting.
To activate them, just click the column you want to apply them to, then choose the data bar color you want from the fly-out menu.
- Excel allows you to customize your data bars by clicking More Rules… at the bottom of the fly-out menu.
For example, if you have out-layers in your data that are throwing the data bars off, you can throw them out by adjusting the Minimum and Maximum values.
- You can not only show data bars, but also toggle between solid bars and gradient fills, change the color, format how you want negative numbers to look, set the border style, and change the bar direction from the New Formatting Rule dialog.
=4= Color Scales : - The color scales work exactly like the data bars.
Personally, I don’t prefer them because I find that the distinctions get a little difficult to read and interpret, especially with larger data sets.
But if you like them, knock yourself out.
=5= Icon Sets: - This is another popular conditional formatting option (Conditional Formatting > Icon Sets).
Their default options are pretty lame, but I like to customize them to show things like keywords that are ranking on page1, page2, and page3 and beyond.
and this can be done by choosing More Rules at the bottom of the fly-out menu instead of clicking on the traffic lights.
- To do so, start with changing the Icon Style to the traffic light, use Reverse Icon Order option, you can Change Type to Number for requested colors and set each color icon’s Value to its range, i.e., >= n (or > n-1).
=6= Modifying Your Conditional Formatting: - You create, edit, delete, and view all conditional formatting rules in the workbook by using the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager dialog box.
(On the Home tab, click Conditional Formatting, and then click Manage Rules, then just double-click on the rule you want to edit or click the Edit Rule button).
- Since your conditional formatting is applied in the order of the rules listed in Rules Manager dialog, you can also move the rules up or down using the arrow buttons.
Furthermore, you can tell Excel to stop if a particular rule evaluates to true.
=7= Using Formulas: - As you get more comfortable with conditional formatting, using the formula option will save you some time.
You’ll also need to use the formula option if you want to format the cells in one column based on the values in another.
- When you go to Conditional Formatting >New Rule, Under Select a Rule Type, choose Use a formula to determine which cells to format; Assuming your data begins in the Row4, you would enter this formula in the formula field: =AND(B4>=x, C4>=y, D4

In short we can say that Excel conditional formatting icon sets are used to visually represent the data that is with the help of arrows, shapes, check marks, flags,  stars & etc.