How to make decisions

Font + REPT Function = Bar Charts?

January 05, 2023

Happy 2023!  🎉 I hope your holidays were cheerful and restorative. If one of your resolutions is to level up and become more *optimized* in your Excel skills, I’m offering a free Excel-only training on January 13 and 14. In just one hour, you’ll get dozens of my favorite tips and techniques that’ll save you hours in your workweek. Here’s to us tackling the new year together! 

You To The Scribble Line After Learning This Excel Tip

It's time for a pop quiz (cue the high school flashbacks). 📝

Imagine you’re a sales manager and you’re uploading the number of sales each person from your company snagged.

Your boss asks if you can insert horizontal bar charts into the Excel worksheet so they can see at a glance how everyone did.

Maybe you go for the “Scribble” line so you can draw them yourself (love the artistic confidence). But what if I told you that you could create horizontal bar charts in Excel by displaying the output of a function as a specific font?

That’s right! This little-known trick only takes two minutes and shows you that by turning a function's output into a certain font, Excel can do way more than meets the eye. 

And this tip doesn’t just apply to sales. You can use bar charts to visually represent:

💰 A company’s revenue per day, week, month, or year

📊 The number of answers a poll got

​​📝 A classroom’s grades (assuming they’re graded from 0 to 100)

To get these results, we’ll need to use the =REPT function, which repeats text a certain number of times based on your input. Here’s how we’d combine a function that repeats a vertical line (|) and the Playbill font to get those charts. 👇

Step 1: In the cell where you’d like to insert your chart, start typing =REPT(“|” . The “|” (a vertical line) is the character we want to repeat.

Step 2: Select the cell with the number of times you want “|” to repeat and close the formula. In our case, we’d type in “B5” (avoid typing the raw number as it could mess up your formula!). 

As you can see, this turned our cell into a bizarre looking barcode, but don’t worry. This is where the Playbill font comes in to save the day. 

Step 3: Select the Playbill font to get a solid line. Then, you can drag down and you now have charts for each of your cells. 📈

If you’re more of a visual learner, you can watch this tip on my TikTok where I cover it in 12 seconds flat. Enjoy never having to rely on your artistic skills to create charts again (phew)! 

How to Make Decisions: Expansive vs. Contracted

I used to think of myself as an indecisive person. It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I wanted—but when it came to making decisions, I had a hard time figuring out what to say “yes” or “no” to.

Cue the bazillion decision-making techniques we’re all familiar with. The pros and cons list, the flip of a coin, the “I’ll think about it” method, the debating with friends over coffee (or wine, although that’ll definitely impact your decision). 🙃

While I was building Miss Excel in 2020, I discovered a new decision-making technique from Marie Forleo that ended up being a game changer.

Forleo believes that we can test if a decision is right for us by listening to our bodies and feeling if they expand or contract.

Let’s say you have a big decision on your hands. Find a quiet place, sit down, close your eyes, take three deep breaths, and then ask yourself: “Does this feel like an expansive hell yes or a contractive nope?”

Here’s a chart for how each sensation could feel:

It might feel wacky to rely on your body to help you make life-altering decisions, but it holds a great amount of intuition.

For example, while your brain knows what you “should” decide, the body remains unbiased and will always tell you how it actually feels. This helps explain why phrases such as “trust your gut” are so widely used.

Today, any major Miss Excel decision gets the expansive vs. contractive treatment. And if it’s not a “hell yes” I can feel throughout my body, then I know it’s not the right decision for me.

If you try it (or already use this technique), let me know—I’d love to hear how it’s been panning out for you!

Sick of biased news? Try 1440.

If you wish all news could be as no-nonsense as this, you'll want to check out a newsletter loved by millions, called 1440. It's a daily digest of all the most important info in culture, science, sports, politics, business, and everything in between—and better yet, it's the fastest way to an informed and impartial point-of-view.​

The folks at 1440 scour over 100 sources every morning so you don't have to. You'll save time and start your day smarter. What more could you ask for?

​Sign up for 1440 now and get your first five-minute read this minute. It's completely free—no catches, no nonsense, and absolutely no BS.

  • CNBC covered how I spend my day as an entrepreneur (still pinching myself over this!)

  • What can you do in 40 seconds? Learn six new Excel functions from my video. 😎

  • NASA scientists determined that the ideal length for a power nap is 10–20 minutes.

  • I’m starting 2023 by creating a vision board. Canva lets you make them for free if you’d like to join! 

  • Have you heard about ChatGPT yet? If not, you’ll definitely want to read this.

Ever wondered why people start chasing their goals on January 1?

Because in those fresh-start moments, people feel distant from their past selves and failures, giving them more motivation to reinvent themselves.

This is known as the fresh-start effect, but it’s not only reserved for the New Year!

Use it to your advantage by framing more events as “new beginnings,” be they Mondays, birthdays, or trying a new coffee joint for the first time. ☕️

Stay Excelling,

Kat