When Lotus 1-2-3 was the only game in town, you could enter a backslash followed by any character and Lotus would repeat that character throughout a cell. If the cell width grew larger or smaller, so did the character. In Excel, this feature is handled by the function REPT. It’s not quite as efficient because you must add the character to the formula, then specify how many times you want that character repeated. This means if the cell width is increased, the repeated character is not, and if the cell width is decreased, the repeated character bleeds over into the adjacent cell.

The syntax for this function: =REPT(“*”,5); =REPT(“—“,10), =REPT(“+”,12). You can repeat any character on the keyboard plus symbols.