Comments on: Data Bars in Excel 2003 – without REPT

By: Lars

Lars — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:25:45 +0000

Great tip. I wonder how I would go about returning a string with a certain color?

By: jeffrey weir

jeffrey weir — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:55:54 +0000

[I never did like Excel 2007’s databars. The gradient at the end just kills me.]

On the up side, they can coexist with text in a cell. I just printed off a very column heavy data dump for my boss on a very tight timeframe. Databars helped highlight some numbers for her, in almost zero time. Granted, it wasn’t a long term reporting solution. But I found the feature useful.

By: Bob Phillips

Bob Phillips — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:54:35 +0000

Databars are a poor data representation, and databars in 2007 with that dumb fade-off are an abomination. Yours at least don’t suffer the fade-off, but they still fail to convey information accurately IMO.

Shouldn’t the Excel (Office?) designers be made to study Tufte and Few and get to understand good visualisation techniques (or even read ‘Dashboards for Dummies’ … plug, plug! Send Jensen a copy Mike.)

By: Liu 's chart blog

Liu 's chart blog — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 02:30:32 +0000

Hi Mike :
It is a cool tip.however ,both this databar and the rept func,will produce a bar that is not ccurate, and when printed ,zoomed ,they are not continuous.
I perfer to create a true bar chart ,and align it to the cell .

By: datapig

datapig — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:20:42 +0000

Ron: Very true. This is one reason I can’t get completely excited about the new features in Excel 2010 (such as sparklines). If they aren’t backwards compatible, it becomes virtually useless to 50+ percent of Excel users. I’ve yet to see the new conditional formatting tools being used at the clients I work for. They purposely stay away from them for the very reason state.