This is the first time I reblog a post from a fellow computational chemist and the reason why I do it is because of its beautiful simplicity and usefulness. Given the scope this blog has taken I think this post becomes most appropriate. This post will show you how to create an energy level diagram using nothing but MS Excel.
Kudos to ‘Eutactic’, from Australia, for coming up with a nice solution to this problem. Check out his blog at eutactic.wordpress.com.
Thanks for letting me repost it 🙂

eutactic

I worked out a very quick and easy way to generate level schemes in Excel, based on a query from one of the other students in the group. Normally I would resort to something like the astonishing TikZ for this sort of task, however our group is very much a Microsoft Office ‘What You See Is A Metaphor For Cosmic Horror‘ group and recommending that a colleague learns two new markup languages to produce a figure is probably not helpful in the short term. One of the issues with charting energy levels in Excel is that levels are typically represented by horizontal bars connected at their vertices with lines representing transitions. Whilst Excel does have a horizontal bar as a marker, it possesses two show-stopping limitations:

  1. It is only uniformly scalable, and can only be scaled so far – we cannot make it anywhere near wide and…

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