Creating a Simple Chart

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Most Excel users know the traditional method of creating charts under the Charts section. However, there is another simpler way of doing it using a formula. The benefits of that way over charts:

1. Simplicity; as there is no complication in terms of selecting source data, chart type and style..etc.

2. Being adjacent to the table/cells that contain the source data as opposed to creating a chart as an object in the sheet or even as a separate sheet.

However, the drawback of this method is that it may not be convenient in case complex charts are needed with presentation-friendly layouts, since it has limited formatting options and no variety of types to choose from.

To create a simple chart, use the REPT function. This function repeats a certain character a number of times. Combined with the selection of a symbol-type font, a bar-type chart is created.

For illustrative purposes, the following hypothetical example sales table is used:

	A	B
1	Month	Sales
2	Jan	33,011
3	Feb	43,908
4	Mar	41,261
5	Apr	9,154
6	May	62,719
7	Jun	40,103
8	Jul	52,330
9	Aug	2,896
10	Sep	94,497
11	Oct	65,003
12	Nov	43,270

13

Dec

45,458

1. Under column C, enter the following formula:

REPT("n",B2/1000)

2. Select column C and change the font to "Wingdings", which is a common font that returns symbols/icons rather than letters and numbers.

So what does that mean?

"n" is the character/text that you want to repeat, when Wingdings font is selected, n shows as a filled square rather than the letter n.

B2 is the cell that contains the sales figure, which you want to provide an indicator for. However, since the figures in column B are in tens of thousands, this would result in a very long indicator, so we divide the figure by 1,000 so that the indicator length would become reasonable.

The result should look like the following:

Voila! You have a simple progress indicator within the sheet itself.

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