What are “Sparklines”

“Sparklines” are new in “Excel 2010 “.
A “Sparkline” is a very small graph in the background of a cell (1).
Unlike “Charts”, “Sparklines” are not objects, but graphs that are integrated into a cell. This allows you to enter text in a cell (2) and use a “Sparkline” as background.

 

Add “Sparklines “

To add “Sparklines” to a cell, first select the cell, then select the “Insert” tab. You will see three types in the “Sparklines”group.
They are “Line”, “Column” and “Win/Loss”. I think all these are clear.

As an example I choose the type as “Column”.
This opens the dialog “Create Sparklines”
In the top box give the “Range” of the data that you want to display as a “Sparkline”.
In the bottom box type the cell, or type the cell “Range” where you want to place the “Sparkline” (s).
I had already selected the “Column” in the “Sparklines” group in the “Ribbon”, so this cell is already filled in for me.
Then click the OK button.

The “Sparkline” is added to the cell and when selected, an additional “Design” tab in the “Ribbon” (1) appears under the name “Sparkline tools”‘.
If you want to copy the “Sparkline” to the underlying cells, click and drag the fill handle (2) at the bottom right of the cell.

Let me just go through this.
The first button is the “Edit Data” where, we can change the “Range” of data and / or the location of a “Sparkline” range or a group “Sparklines”.
We can group or ungroup “Sparklines”.
The advantage of grouped “Sparklines” is that you can change format of all at once.
The advantage of a single “Sparkline” is that you can only format this “Sparkline”.
On the far right side of the “Ribbon”, in the “Group” section, we find the buttons to group or ungroup “Sparklines”.

With the three buttons in the “Type”, we can change the type of “Sparkline”.
In addition, in the section “Show” we have some boxes with which we can accentuate certain points in the “Sparkline” . Especially the “Negative points” box seems useful when working with figures on profit and loss.

In the next section, the section “Style”, we can choose a preformatted style. This seems obvious to me. Or create a style by pressing the “Sparkline Color” and “Marker Color” buttons.

By clicking on the “Axis” we can see the options to show or hide the vertical and horizontal “Sparkline” axis . Even show the data flip. From right to left so.

Finally we have the “Group” section. I had already talked about it but still, you will find the “Delete” button with which you or a whole group of “Sparklines” can be deleted.

As you notice in the picture below you can add more than a “Sparkline” to your “Worksheet”, you add ” Sparklines” in the background of the cell (see column E), and youcan use both graphs and “Sparklines” together in a “Worksheet” (a).

Change your data in the table, then the data in the “Sparkline”, as in the graph, adapted.

Change the width of a column (b), or change the height of a row (c) the size of the “Sparkline” will automatically adjust (d).

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