Build a plain-text urgency bar and price each line for an emailed restock report
REPT repeats a character exactly as many times as you tell it to, and DOLLAR turns a plain number into the currency text a chart-free email actually needs — neither one reads what the other produces.
Task:
You handle inventory for a hardware store, and mornings start with an automated reorder email that goes out as plain text — no images, no embedded charts, just characters a mail client can render. Four products need restocking today. In column D, build a quick urgency bar for each one using REPT, one "■" character per unit needed, so a reader can see which products are furthest behind at a glance. In column E, show what restocking each product will cost — units needed times unit cost — formatted as currency text with DOLLAR, rounded to two decimal places, ready to paste straight into that email.
Learning Objectives:
- Use REPT to turn a plain count into a repeated-character bar for a plain-text report
- Use DOLLAR to format a calculated number as currency text, not just a rounded number
- Recognize when two formulas in the same row are answering different questions rather than feeding into each other
Solve without hints for +5 XP
Interactive Spreadsheet
The data in this exercise
This is the grid you start with. Cell references in the task — B6, C2 — point at the row numbers and column letters below.
| A | B | C | D | E | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product | Units Needed | Unit Cost | Reorder Bar | Reorder Cost |
| 2 | Widget A | 3 | 12.5 | ||
| 3 | Widget B | 6 | 4.25 | ||
| 4 | Widget C | 2 | 45 | ||
| 5 | Widget D | 5 | 8.75 |
What this exercise teaches (contains the answer)
REPT("■",B2) doesn't know anything about inventory — it just repeats whatever character it's given exactly as many times as its second argument says, so Widget A's 3 units needed becomes three squares and Widget B's 6 becomes six, giving a reader something to compare at a glance without an actual chart. DOLLAR(B2*C2,2) is answering a completely different question: B2*C2 works out the plain number 37.5 for Widget A, and DOLLAR turns that number into the text "$37.50" — the dollar sign and the trailing zero a plain number quietly drops both appear because DOLLAR is formatting for a reader, not just rounding for a spreadsheet. Neither function reads what the other one produced; REPT's bar in column D and DOLLAR's price in column E just sit side by side, describing the same row from two different angles, one visual and one exact.