Why dont you try this formula: =TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A4,”/”,REPT(” “,255)),255))

(you recommended it here: http://chandoo.org/wp/2008/11/11/excel-formula-help-finding-repeated-words-cell/#comments)

Again, the above formula assumes max. length of 255 chars (which should be fine for almost all cases), but depending on your needs, you may want to adjust the 255 to a number higher than that.

Btw, string manipulation in excel is little cumbersome due the lack of powerful (and simple to use) formulas. I suggest adding VBA UDFs whenever you feel a certain thing is taking too much time and leave it at that instead of trying to solve all by using existing formulas.

Happy new year to you

first i wish you a very happy new year……….well this is something i got on new year’s eve but inspite of trying hard i couldn’t succeed so now i need your help…..

The thing is i have lengthy PDF file names in one column and want to extract characters to the right of last “\” entered….

I tried below formulae but it fails for entries which are too lengthy…….

=LEFT(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(TRIM(B2)&”",”\”,REPT(” “,40)),40),40)

Last year we had a topic about boxplots in excel on Stephen Few’s forum. There may be some useful information for interested people. Including a link to a workbook by excel grand master Jon Peltier. See http://www.websitetoolbox.com/tool/post/sfew/vpost?id=1757218.

regards,
nixnut

thanks for pointing to Fabrice’s sparklines. I am already one of the biggest fans of Fabrice’s sparklines for XL as you can read in some of my other comments here on PHD:

http://chandoo.org/wp/2008/08/26/microsoft-excel-links/#comment-19991

But we intentionally did it without using Fabrice’s sparklines for 2 reasons:

1. One of our main goals was showing how to create analytical dashboards without VBA. I agree, VBA can add a lot of value to dashboard implementation and sometimes it is even inevitable. But still a lot of Excel users shrink back from VBA and therefore Chandoo and I decided to show some techniques with plain old Excel formulas.

2. Box plots are a great visualization technique and you can create them in Excel without VBA as well. But in my day to day business very often people are not familiar with the concept of box plots. That is why we tried to find an alternative which – hopefully – is easier to understand. I am not sure whether or not it really is easier to understand. This was just a first try.

Nice dashboard btw

regards,
nixnut