Creating drop charts in Excel

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by WibblingJo on July 17, 2009 at 8:07am

Brian,

Could you provide an example of your problem? I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to achieve.

Thanks

Jo

Permalink Reply by Brian Woolvett on July 18, 2009 at 4:16am

H Jo
What I was doing was typing a name in one cell then using the drawing tools draw a line down vertically and then horizontally with linking vertical lines for each person, what I've done so far looks good in Excel but with a couple of thousand relatives it's a bit time consuming, I've tried various other programs that do drop down charts but when I try to run them they all crash with a message chart to large, hence the reason I;m trying to create my own.

Permalink Reply by WibblingJo on July 18, 2009 at 12:29pm

Brian,

It sounds like you are trying to use Excel as a type of reporting tool - to produce a easy to view list? I'm not sure that Excel is the ideal tool for this and a dedicated genealogy program would probably be better for this type of reporting.

If you are doing this to allow you to cross reference names then it might be better to look at setting up some sort of database that would allow you to see how people are connected? This could potentially have some sort of reporting front page so that if you put in a particular reference it brings up the associated family members. This could be done in Excel but I believe you could do this in a more straightforward way by using some sort of Family Tree software.

This probably isn't an ideal answer but that is the direction I would take. Maybe other members of the group have more sophisticated Excel programs for their genealogy and could shed some light on what they do?

Let me know if I've got the wrong end of the stick though!!

Jo