I'm working on a spreadsheet that
contains a number of different
salespeople and the amount that they
sold each month and I need a way of
visualizing these numbers so I can
easily see how each sales person is
doing month to month I could just put
them all into one big chart but while
this may look cool it's not exactly easy
to read and it would be almost
impossible to pinpoint a specific
salesperson on this chart
luckily in Excel 2010 there's another
option called sparklines
that will allow us to give each
salesperson a separate miniature chart
that fits into a single cell in this
case we'll be putting a sparkline on
each row so it'll be right next to its
source data
to get started select the data for a
single spark line in most cases that
will mean a single row or column and
then on the insert tab there is a spark
lines group that has commands for the
three different types line column and
win/loss I'll select line
and we just need to select the location
for the sparkline which will be the cell
right next to our selection
and there's our first sparkline will
copy this the same way that we copy a
formula by dragging the fill handle
you
now all of these rows have sparklines
and it's easy to see whether sales are
increasing or decreasing for each
employee
for example David Carlson's sales are
trending upward but Elizabeth Ferguson
sales are trending downward
let's make some changes to the spark
lines to make them stand out a little
better if you want to make them larger
you can just make all of the rows taller
and the sparklines will stretch to fit
them
then select any sparkline it doesn't
matter which one and the design tab will
appear with a number of different spark
line tools that you can use to modify
them and if you ever need to delete them
then you can just use the clear command
in the show group there are some options
that let you highlight certain points
and probably the most useful ones are
High Point and low point and I also like
first point and last point
and now I know there are no negative
points in this worksheet so I won't
worry about those and markers will
highlight every single point which may
make it look a little too cluttered
it may be helpful to choose a style that
has a little more contrast I like this
one because it makes the High Point and
low point green and red which really
makes them stand out
in the type group you can change the
type of sparkline that you're using
column is usually a good choice and
it'll work with most types of data when
los will basically just show whether the
values are positive or negative but it
won't actually show how low or high the
values are and since I don't have any
negative values here that's not as
useful so I'll just use column
now there's one important thing that you
need to know about how Excel displays
spark lines by default each spark line
is sort of stretched to fit its own cell
so the maximum value will go up to the
top of the cell and the minimum will be
at the very bottom the problem with this
is it doesn't show you how high or low
the values are compared to the other
spark lines for example all of these
maximum values look the same even though
the values may be very different and
this can be misleading to fix this go to
the axis command and you can see that
the minimum and maximum options are set
to automatic and you'll need to change
both of these to same for all spark
lines
and now we can see that the maximum and
this sparkline is much higher than the
maximum in this one compared to
traditional charts sparklines offer a
very different approach to visualizing
data and depending on what type of
project you're working on you may prefer
one or the other and sometimes to get
the most complete picture you may even
choose to use both like what you just
saw radix add a comment subscribe to our
Channel
the freedom to learn what you want when
you want absolutely free GCF learn
free.org