Today we are going to start a
brief series of posts revolving around the powerful little (it truly is “little”)
Excel tool referred to as Sparklines.
These amazing miniature appliances
were first introduced in Excel 2010, and they have gained a fair amount of
popularity. Sparklines simply are Miniature
Charts that fit into a single cell or range in your worksheet. As with
any chart, they provide you with a visual representation of your data, but in
this case, they do so without having to resort to a
full-blown chart.
Although
these tiny charts are typically used in a separate cell range adjacent to your
data, they actually reside in the background of a cell similar to
formatting. It can overlay (or underlay)
other contents of a cell, adding creative possibilities for displaying your
information.
There
are several advantages for using Sparklines.
They can Simplify your visual representations of your data, and can do
so with just a couple of clicks! They
are particularly useful in creating Mini-Trendlines for tracking a
myriad of business metrics. Insert them in an adjacent column of a data-heavy
report, and you get a result that can tell you at a glance the direction of
your department.
Creating Sparklines
1.
Select
a group of cells in which you want to insert your Sparklines.
2.
Find
the Sparklines group on the Insert ribbon, and click the type
of Sparkline
that you want to create, (Line, Column, or even Win/Loss).
3.
In the Data
box, select and insert the range of the cells that contain the data on which
you want to create your Sparklines.
Bamm -
Sparklines! Simple
as that! Next week we will look at some creative ways of customizing these
little gems, so you can truly make your Excel reports, well, Sparkle!
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