An alternative to traditional charts in Excel - Sparklines

Hello everyone

Today let's talk about something that Microsoft introduced for Excel 2010: Sparklines!
These geniuses that can make visualisations easier and faster. There are many times we show a lot of charts and we can overload our presentations, and a simple chart (or sparkline in this case) would be sufficient to convey to the listener what you intend to do.

And what are Sparklines?

Sparklines are tiny charts that are aligned to a row of a table of data and help you visualize the data to show a quick visual representation. They are basically in-cell charts.

Sadly, Sparklines do not work in versions prior to Excel 2010.

What kind of Sparklines do we have?

There are 3 types of Sparklines:

1. Line
2. Column
3. Win/Loss

And how do we create them?

To enter a Sparklines just run these 3 simple steps:

1. Go to menu Insert> once there, select your preferred Sparklines.

2. After selecting the type you want, select the data in the 'Data range', for example in our table above I would select the goals scored by each team in each of the seasons. We now also choose the cell where the Sparklines will be placed ('Location range').

3. We format them if preferred. And that's it!

Formatting Sparklines

There is a sub-menu called "Sparklines Tools", which will show once you select the cell in which there is a Sparkline. In this menu, there is a Design option which is needed to format the Sparklines.

As shown in this menu we can perform the following formatting options to Sparklines:

• Change the type of sparkline

• Show (maximum) high point or low (minimum) and the first point or last

• Add markers to all points

• Change the colour of Sparklines as well as markers

• Edit the axes

What if ...

• if the selected data contains non-numerical data >> the Sparklines ignore this data

• if the selected data contains blank data >> the Sparklines show blanks.

• if the selected data contains data with zeros >> the Sparklines show the zeros

• if the selected data contains data that is #N/A >> the Sparklines ignore this data

Well, I hope this post was useful, and that you use Sparklines to enhance your presentations, or your dashboards. It would be nice to know how you use them, and that you can share tricks or suggestions about Sparklines by entering comments in this post.

Download an example file

To download an example file with all the examples that we are covering here click on the following link:

Sparklines

Learn how to create awesome dashboards

Click here for dashboard examples.

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