Excel Cookbook

Chapter 13. Graphics, Sparklines, and 3D Maps

Graphics can help bring spreadsheets to life and communicate your message more effectively than text and numbers alone. While Chapter 12 focused solely on charts, this chapter covers other areas—from using symbols and shapes to creating 3-D data visualizations.

The recipes in this chapter include areas such as the following:

• Inserting symbols, shapes, sketches, and pictures

• Creating SmartArt diagrams

• Using the Camera tool to create linked pictures and monitor parts of your workbooks

• Working with sparklines

• Using 3D Maps to explore geographic and temporal data and create virtual tours and movies

13.1 Inserting Symbols

Problem

You want to add symbols or special characters to a cell or custom number format.

Solution

Suppose you want to add a copyright character to a cell or up and down arrows to a custom number format. You can do so by inserting a symbol or special character.

You can add a symbol or special character to a cell as follows (see Figure 13-1):

1. Select the cell and put the cursor where you want to insert the symbol or special character.

2. Choose Insert ⇒ Symbols ⇒ Symbol to open the Symbol dialog box.

3. Click Symbols or Special Characters, depending on the type of character you wish to insert, then browse the available options. If you’ve clicked the Symbols option, you can use the Subset drop-down list to see all the available characters in a specific category, such as arrows or geographic characters.