Text Functions
Intermediate

REPT with a scaled bar

Big numbers need dividing down before they become a bar.

Task:

You want a quick in-cell bar chart of monthly visitors, but 3,400 bars will not fit in a cell. In C2:C6 draw one | for every 100 visitors, rounded to the nearest whole bar.

Interactive Spreadsheet

Read about REPT

Hints

+5 XPno-hints bonus

Solve it on your own to keep the bonus. Each hint gets one step closer to the formula.

Variations of REPT

0/3

The same formula in the other shapes it takes at work.

  1. REPT Function

    Repeat text a specified number of times.

    Core
    Intermediate
  2. REPT with a scaled bar

    Big numbers need dividing down before they become a bar.

    Intermediate
  3. REPT to pad a number with zeros

    Make every ID the same width: as many zeros as are missing, then the number.

    Advanced

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.

6 rows × 3 columns5 cells you fill in
ABC
1MonthVisitorsBar
2Jan1240
3Feb1890
4Mar3420
5Apr2650
6May960
What this exercise teachesMay contain the answer

REPT ignores the fraction of a repeat count, so 12.4 bars is silently 12 — and 18.9 would also be 18. Rounding first makes the bar honest to the nearest hundred. Changing the 100 rescales every bar at once.