In-cell Graphing with Excel

Posted on August 2nd, 2007 in MSOffice, Productivity, Tools by Jay

Great article that shows how to use some simple techniques to do in-cell graphing in Excel.  I find this a really simple way to align data with a graphical presentation of such, sometime it’s just too hard to get the data to align with the information you are graphing when using a true Excel chart.  This appears to be a great little work around.

It uses a REPT function in Excel that I didn’t even know existed.  The purpose of this function is to repeat a string a certain number of times.  The function accepts 2 parameters…

=REPT(string to repeat, time to repeat it)

As is typical in Excel, a string in a function or formula needs to be wrapped in double quotes…

=REPT(”-”,17)

The above would repeat the hyphen 17 times.  Not so useful however replace the hyphen with a bar (or pipe character, it’s the one on the backslash key) and the 17 with a reference to a cell containing the information you want to graph, and you’re all done!

I played with the font sizes a little to get something reasonable. Let me know how you go if you use it.

Social Networking: Facebook

Posted on August 2nd, 2007 in Productivity, Websites by Jay

Here is a nice document which popped up in my reader today about Facebook, a social network.  If the whole social network concept is new then here are a few steps you can follow to get up and running.  Facebook appears to have some of the largest growth in this environment right now, so if you had to pick one, I would pick this.