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.

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