One of the cool new features added in Excel 2010 is Sparklines. If you’re like me, and you don’t pay attention to the names of graphs and other such information, you may not have heard of Sparklines – but you’ve probably come across them in a newspaper or on a website.
A Sparkline is a small, high density graph that is meant to present a condensed form of information. Unlike a full graph, that usually has a visible X and Y axis , Sparklines are alone. They don’t provide as much detail as a normal graph, but because there’s no X and Y axis or other luggage, you can fit Sparklines into small spaces – like a cell on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet - easily. Sparklines are quicker and smaller than a full graph and often just as useful.
There are three different types of Sparklines; line, column and win/loss. The first two are likely to be familiar to anyone who has used charts even a few times before. The line chart makes a graph of each data point and then draws lines between them, of course, and the column chart make each data point an appropriately sized column. The win/loss option is a bit different, however; it presents information as a binary “up” or “down” box.
Sparklines are simple to insert. You only need to click the appropriate Sparklines button in the insert tab and then select the data you want to graph. Everything else is handled for you automatically. You can click on the Sparkline and select the Sparkline Tools tab to make some adjustments. For example, line graphs are smooth by default, but you can click the Markers checkbox to add a square box to represent each data point. You can also edit the colours of the graph. One popular example is the use of a green colour to highlight the most positive data on a graph and a red colour to indicate the most negative.
