Comments on: Creating in-cell bar charts / histograms in excel

By: DogSolitude » Blog Archive » Creating in-cell bar charts in excel

DogSolitude » Blog Archive » Creating in-cell bar charts in excel — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:21:54 +0000

[...] Creating in-cell bar charts / histograms in excel @ Pointy Haired Dilbert Filed under: Stuff [...]

By: Chandoo

Chandoo — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:10:00 +0000

@Ben… you can change the color of all bars in a cell using conditional formatting. But selectively changing color of bars inside cell is not possible unless you do it manually or through VBA.

By: Ben

Ben — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:06:58 +0000

Is there a way to change the colour of the bars based upon the data. eg. 1-5 = red, 6-7 = amber, 8-10 = Green

By: Matt A.

Matt A. — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 11:26:29 +0000

After some searching through the character maps in Arial I noticed that there’s a box symbol –> ? (created by holding ALT then typing 5595 on the numpad) that would work perfectly as another character to use for column charts. It looks just like the Webdings “g” character.

By: Chandoo

Chandoo — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:09:21 +0000

@Matt A: I am sorry for the formatting mishap. I am afraid of using too many plug ins, but I guess a simple HTML based comment box seems like a good idea now that lot more commenters are typing formulas and vba code in the comment box.

Coming to the formula.. thanks for sharing it. And yes, you are right, webdings is common to Office 2007 too. But even better solution would be to use good old pipe | symbol. When the font is Arial, the pipe character spacing looks optimum and subtle enough to look like an incell histogram / column chart.

By: Matt A.

Matt A. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:20:42 +0000

Wow, the formatting was horrid, let’s elaborate a bit more…

REPT(”",-1)&REPT(”n”,) – would give you a line graph, where could be a reference to each cell you’d like as a data point.

REPT just repeats a text string a number of times, it can be either a hard number (like Pedro’s example), or a reference to a value in another cell (more handy). I believe Webdings is a common font in the MS Office suites I’m familiar with (2000 thru 2003), but I’m not sure of 2007’s suite.

By: Matt A.

Matt A. — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:14:16 +0000

@Chandoo: Yep, that’s exactly what I meant, use your text rotation and char(10) trick with REPT(”G”,) (then set the font to Webdings) to get your string of bars with variable height.

@Pedro: REPT(”g”,1) will give you one “g” (or in Webdings a bar of 1 height).

REPT(”g”,B2) will repeat for the value in B2… Use that with Chandoo’s take on linear normalizing, and yer all set.

Wingdings with an “n” character would be even more portable, but just doesn’t look quite as cool…but pretty much everybody has that font, so it’d be portable.

You may have to adjust the font size in order to get all the bars to show correctly, perhaps some sizing of the row heights as well…

You can fake an incell line chart by using:
REPT(” “,B2-1)&REPT(”n”,B2)
where B2 is the value in the cell you want as a data point.

By: Chandoo

Chandoo — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:59:13 +0000

@Matt: I almost forgot about this comment. Thanks to Pedro for the bump.

As he points, portability is a good idea, but we will not be able to get bars of variable height using webdings font.

We can ofcourse use that along with text rotation and char(10) to create a pseudo incell bars. Here is a tutorial: http://chandoo.org/wp/2008/07/15/incell-bar-charts-revisited/

By: Pedro

Pedro — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:52:49 +0000

Portability is great.
I don’t quite see how the REPT formula and the webding fonts can combine to solve the portability issue.
Mind you, i see that +REPT(”g”,1) will give you a bar, but we would need several bars of unequal lenght.

Can you elaborate?
Thank you

By: Matt A.

Matt A. — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:24:51 +0000

Nifty way to normalize the data….I’ll have to take that into account when working with my charts.

One thing I’d like to add, you can eliminate the need for custom fonts with the bar charts by using a REPT function and using a small “g” set to the Webdings font. It’s more likely anybody opening the file will have access to that font than the custom one you’ve provided. (More portability is a good thing )