We’ve got the perfect tool for your next Olympic medal tracker. It’s super easy to insert country flags into worksheets, and we don’t need to run to Google image search every time to make it happen. Excel can do the searching for us with a nifty tool call Data Types!
A Data Type is a value linked to an online data source that allows us to pull real-time data into our worksheets. Let’s try an example - check out the gif above. To insert each country’s flag by its respective name, we’ll first need to convert the country names into data types. Simply select the text, navigate to Data > Data Types, and, for this example, choose the Geography data type. Our country name will automatically convert, and we’ll see a map icon in front of each value in the Country column.
To pull each country’s flag into our worksheet, we’ll hit the “insert data” icon and select the “image” field - that’s it! Excel automatically inserts each flag into our data table. And we never even left Excel 😎.
The best part about Data Types? They’re dynamic - if any of the reference countries change, the respective flag will automatically update!! 🇦🇶
