Dot leaders in cells? (Excel 2k/SR-1)

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I’ve been asked if there’s anyway to create dot leaders in a cell. They should extend from the end of the text to the cell border. So far, I can’t find anything that allows you to set up tabs with dot leaders, or something comparable. The attorney has typed in strings of periods, but they don’t line up/print correctly when he incorporates the spreadsheet in a Word document. Any ideas? They’ll be appreciated.

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It may not meet formatting requirements, but you could try a setup where the text is actually in another column, and then use the =REPT(text,number of times to repeat) (the repeat function) like this:

	A	B
1	=B1&REPT(” .”,50-LEN(B1))	actual text

which will look like this:

	A	B
1	actual text . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .	actual text

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Thanks for the suggestion. I’m not sure that will work for him, but I’ve passed it on for him to try. Thanks again.

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I have found that when clients need dot leaders in MS Excel (or MS Word for that matter, but that is another matter) they generally put a series of periods in until it fills the cell. And this does not always look the way they want.
The alternative is to place one period in the cell and then, from the Format | Cells… menu choose the Alignment tab and from the Horizontal: drop-down option choose Fill. The only problem with this is that MS Excel cells have leading and trailing areas that do not allow the ‘filled’ characters to fully occupy the space available so you get an effect of a small gap between cells when printed.
There are two solutions to that.
1. If the dot leaders are to cover more than one cell across, simply merge the cells and then , VIOLA!, you have continuous dot leaders.
2. If the above is not acceptable, simply format the lower border of the cells with the dots option (Line | Style: of the Border tab of Format | Cells… command).

HTH, Leigh

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That’s a neat trick, Leigh. I hadn’t run across the “fill” option before. I passed on the suggestion to the attorney. One thing I noticed, however. In cell A2, for example, we have the name of the account, in B2 a dollar figure, and so on down the list. He wants the dot leader to fill from the end of the name in A1, B1, C1, etc., to fill to the end of that cell. I inserted a new column B, and used your . and fill trick, and that worked well. However, when I tried to merge the cells in column A and B, it wouldn’t let me. It keeps only the initial period, and not the filled information. Regardless, it’s a good option for me to know, and I thank you for your suggestion.

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Try this custom format: @*.

The @ stands for text, the * tells excel to repeat the dot to the end of the cell

HTH
Ken

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