Excel in-cell bar charts

Often you don't need to create a big chart to get your point across. The concept of having bar charts in a cell has been around for a while, and Microsoft picked it up for Excel 2007.

As soon as I saw them in a beta version of Excel, I started hunting around for the property formatting to get rid of the gradient on the bars - what's the point of having a comparison if you can't actually easily see where the bar ends? Unfortunately there is no way to change this - lots of washed out color options, but no option for just a solid color.

I'm certainly not the first to point this out, or that the zero has a default thickness of 10% (!?) making it hard to distinguish between zero and low numbers and making comparisons misleading between very high numbers and low numbers. Equally the bars are scaled by default between the lowest and highest number, not zero to the highest number.

Excel 2010 fixes these issues - allowing for solid fill (though the gradient fill is still the default option), defaulting to scale the bars from 0, and adding a few nice features. I'm still surprised that they didn't get it right first time - it is so obviously wrong in the current version.

As 2010 isn't out yet, and it will take a while for many companies to upgrade, the best way to do in-cell bar charts is using a formula to create the bar. You can even get fancy and have multiple bars in one cell. These methods aren't perfect - you have to choose your font carefully to get a solid bar, and the resolution to show differences in bar heights is limited because you're using characters instead of a graphic - they work well though. The example shown uses the formula "=REPT("|",cell ref to left), | is the pipe symbol. The font is Script, bolded, and I've toned the bars down to a light grey and added conditional formatting to show values 35 or higher