Excel Optical Illusions #9

Very nice indeed. I closed my eyes - and yes - its still twitching! Keine mehr lorem ipsum, ich liebe der chicken. Schlaffen. Guten nicht.

It may be handy to call out a few techniques used in these workbooks or give some cursory explanation of the mechanics. Working through some of the workbooks can be difficult unless you already have a sense of what is going on. E.g. this workbook uses conditional formatting for the background, but unless you click on the cell and hit conditional formatting you would not know. (Or is there some way to identify conditional formatting in a workbook without knowing ahead of time which cells already have it?) Likewise, you use the REPT() function to conditionally display text. This is something you explain well in a comment to the "I Heart IF" post, but I was scratching my head a bit trying to understand what REPT() was used for in this context. Usually I see it used to repeat stuff rather than as a substitute for an if function. I am by no means complaining, these workbooks are great; just trying to get my head around them. On the issue of reverse engineering, is there a way to know the chart type of an existing chart aside from clicking on stuff and trying to figure out the context based on the available options? I suppose this could be done by extracting the relevant property in VBA, but is there another method?

Michael,

You are absolutely right. Thanks for catching that - it's now corrected.

I'm honored that YOU are following my replicas of the illusions from your terrific site:

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/

Regards,

Daniel Ferry
excelhero.com