How to make a forest plot with Excel? A friend of mine asked me on how to do it in excel, and after playing with it a bit (and googling it) I gave up.
Does any one have a suggestion on how it might be done?
 A: This web page ("Forest plots : Introduction and explanation") explains how to draw simple forest plots in MS-Excel.
Is your friend conducting a meta-analysis? In that case s/he might be interested in the following two pages:


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*MIX 2.0 - Meta-Analysis made easy

*MetaEasy Excel add-in
A: Excel gets a bad rap (I suspect because of those horrible 3d graphs and inappropriate pie charts), but this is fairly easily accomplished in Excel charts. It simply takes knowing how to arrange elements on the chart.
This example by Jon Peltier on how to make box plots in Excel can be very easily adapted to forest plots. In fact he has a free utility to make error bars, although doing it yourself is not all that difficult.
If you plan on doing work in Excel and that involves making charts, it would do everyone good to peruse the work on Jon's blog. 
A: Or alternately Forest Plot Viewer http://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/index.cfm?objectid=52A197EE-F1F6-975E-7D16E68BE5E723A5 , which while being a stand-alone program is free, and probably less stress than wrestling with Excel.
A: I had the same question a while back and ended up writing a article explaining some of it. 


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*Neyeloff, JL, Fuchs, SC, & Moreira, LB (2012).  Meta-analyses and Forest plots using a microsoft excel spreadsheet: step-by-step guide focusing on descriptive data analysis.  BMC Research Notes, 5:52.


Here is the sample Excel file from the article with the forest plot.
