Excel® Dashboards & Reports

Chapter 9. Using Excel Sparklines

In This Chapter

• Introducing the new Excel 2010 sparkline feature

• Adding sparklines to a worksheet

• Working with groups of sparklines

• Modifying your sparkline graphic

One of the new features in Excel 2010 is sparkline graphics. Sparklines were developed by visualization guru Edward Tufte. Tufte envisioned mini word-sized charts placed in and among the data that they represent. Sparklines enable you to see trends and patterns within your data at a glance using minimal space. Following the sparkline concept, Microsoft then implemented sparklines in Excel worksheets so that you can get visual context for data that does not take up a lot of real estate on your dashboard.

This chapter introduces you to sparklines, and demonstrates how you can use them as visualizations in your dashboard.

Note

Sparklines are new to Excel 2010. If you create a workbook that uses sparklines, and that workbook is opened using a previous version of Excel, the sparkline cells will be empty.

Sparklines alternatives

Sparklines is a new feature, and is available only in Excel 2010. If you don't use Excel 2010, you might want to check out some add-ins that bring sparkline features to earlier versions of Excel. Some of these products support additional sparkline types, and most have many additional customization options.

Search the Web for sparklines excel, and you'll find several add-ins to choose from.

Introducing Sparklines

Although sparklines look like miniature charts (and can sometimes ...