Use “Playbill” font to make your incell charts realistic [quick-tips]

Share

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Most of you already know that using the REPT formula along with pipe (“|”) symbol, we can make simple in-cell charts in excel. For eg. =REPT("|",10) looks like a bar chart of width 10.

Despite the simplicity, most people don’t use in-cell charts because these charts don’t look anything like their counterparts. But you can overcome this drawback with a secret I am share now.

Just change the font to “Playbill”. See this to understand the difference.

Use Playbill font to get better in-cell charts in Excel

With a simple font change, you can make your incell charts magical. What more, combining incell charts with conditional formatting and some awesome alignment, you can make charts like this with ease.

Incell variance chart

PS: Playbill is one of the default fonts of Windows operating system, so you don’t need to worry about the availability.

Related: Tutorials on in-cell charts | REPT formula help & syntax | Conditional Formatting Basics | Quick tips

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

Share this tip with your colleagues

Excel and Power BI tips - Chandoo.org Newsletter

Get FREE Excel + Power BI Tips

Simple, fun and useful emails, once per week.

Learn & be awesome.

Welcome to Chandoo.org

Thank you so much for visiting. My aim is to make you awesome in Excel & Power BI. I do this by sharing videos, tips, examples and downloads on this website. There are more than 1,000 pages with all things Excel, Power BI, Dashboards & VBA here. Go ahead and spend few minutes to be AWESOME.

Read my storyFREE Excel tips book

Overall I learned a lot and I thought you did a great job of explaining how to do things. This will definitely elevate my reporting in the future.
Rebekah S
Reporting Analyst
Excel formula list - 100+ examples and howto guide for you

From simple to complex, there is a formula for every occasion. Check out the list now.

Calendars, invoices, trackers and much more. All free, fun and fantastic.

Advanced Pivot Table tricks

Power Query, Data model, DAX, Filters, Slicers, Conditional formats and beautiful charts. It's all here.

Still on fence about Power BI? In this getting started guide, learn what is Power BI, how to get it and how to create your first report from scratch.

2 Responses to “Top 10 Power BI Interview Questions & Answers”

  1. Keith says:

    Hello...
    In Power BI I have data that includes months by name only (e.g. May, April, December...)
    I need to build charts etc. but i need the months to go chronologically... not alphabetically... I cannot seem to find the fix to this.... once again, my data does NOT have an actual date attached to it (like 02/01/2023)....only month names... can i use a helper table wher i id the month names as numbers 1 thru 12? and if so, how do i manage this to work for me ?
    Thank you.
    ~Keith

    • Chandoo says:

      You need to setup an extra table to map each month name to a running number. A simple 12 row table like
      Jan 1
      Feb 2
      Mar 3
      ..
      Dec 12

      Then create a relationship between this month table and your month column
      Now, go to "table view" in Power BI and set the sort by column to month number for the month name column on this new table.
      Finally, use the new table's month name whenever you need to refer to the month name in the visuals.
      They will be chronologically arranged.

Leave a Reply