In-cell Excel charts

Juice analytics has some Excel graphing tips. You can make charts like below without using charts, using just text.

These are useful because the charts are aligned with the data.

Excel Gantt charts using just text

Excel bar charts using just text

I once used a similar technique to display people’s staffing position. The sheet below lists people, projects they’re on and how long they’ll be on. The coloured cells to the right are a calendar display of the same stuff. Makes it easy to read.

Excel Staffing Plan without using charts

The trick is to place each week for each person as a thin cell, like below. Then the cell is populated with a formula that makes it 0 or 1 depending on whether the person is available that week or not. (The blue row #2 stores the start date of the week, and I compare this with the end date of each person’s project.)

Excel Staffing Plan - formula

And then, you can turn on conditional formatting.

Excel Staffing Plan - conditional formatting

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