Sparklines!

Sparklines are amazing little appliances that were first introduced in Excel 2010.  They are miniature charts that fit into a single cell in your worksheet, providing you with a visual representation of your data without having to resort to a full-blown chart.

Interestingly, a Sparkline is a tiny chart that resides in the background of a cell, not unlike formatting.  It can overlay (or underlay) other contents of a cell, but are typically used in a separate cell adjacent to your data.

The advantages of Sparklines are many.  They can Simplify your visual representations of your data, and can be done so with just a couple of clicks!  Effect and Simple (and that’s what we all want…).  They are particularly successful in creating Mini-Trendlines such as those which are desirable in sales analysis.  To reinforce this point, check out the illustration below.  At a glance, it is easy to tell who is doing well, and who could use improvement.

Create Sparklines

1.      Select a group of cells (or single cell) 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 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.

Badda-Bing!  Simple as that!  Want to add a bit of Illustrative Jazz to your Excel reports?  Think Sparklines!