Symbols in Excel graphs

Question

I am a scientist and would like to use Excel to graph data. I know many people who use Excel graphing. However, Excel graphing will not let you use symbols in the Titles, in the axes labels, or in the data units. Guess what, if you are a scientist or a high school student, symbols are extremely important. Symbols should be included in the Excel graphing function. Thanks for listening.

Answer 1

Might want to list what version of Excel and edit to ask a question like "How do I use symbols in the title of a chart in Excel?"

Answer 2

This link will help:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/insert-symbols-and-special-characters-in-a-worksheet-HP005203600.aspx

I had a similar desire and with some effort was able to get it working in Excel 2007. Here are several ideas:

1. In Excel 2007, choose "Insert", then the "Symbol" menu. It will bring up a dialog box like this one. You can see I chose the subset "Greek and Coptic", and the "Unicode (hex)" options. Then pick the desired Greek letter:

2. Another hint: If you type a "q" in an Excel cell then change the font to "symbol" it should display the Greek letter theta. Similarly, a "p" will show as pi.

3. You may have better luck formatting a number as text and taking advantage of the TEXT() function's flexibility. Here's a screenshot of what I did to get a display of fractions of pi. Again: choose the "Symbol" font for the cell format and use the letter "p" to get "pi".

Here's a final screenshot of what I was able to pull together. You can see the Greek letters in the chart title, legend, and horizontal axis labels. It took some effort, and I agree that Excel could make it easier than they do --- but it's definitely possible; good luck to you!