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I'm working on a spreadsheet that
includes a number of different
salespeople and the amount that they
sold each month I need a way to
visualize these numbers so I can see how
each person sales are progressing over
time I could just put them all together
in one big chart this certainly looks
cool but it's not exactly easy to read
and it's almost impossible to pinpoint
any one person with all these
overlapping lines luckily there's
another option called sparklines that'll
let us give each person their own
separate mini chart one 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 the source data to get
started select the data for a single
sparkline in most cases this will mean a
single row or column then go to the
insert tab and in the sparklines group
you'll find commands for the three
different types line column and win/loss
I'm going to choose line next we just
need to select the cell where we want
the sparkline to go in this case right
next to our source data then click OK
and there's our first sparkline we'll
copy it to the rest of the worksheet the
same way that we copy a formula by
clicking and dragging the fill handle
now all the
sparklines and we can easily see whether
sales are increasing or decreasing for
each employee for example David Carson
sales are trending upward while
Elizabeth counts are trending downward
let's make some changes that will make
the sparkline stand out a bit more if
you want to make them larger you can
just make all the rows taller and the
sparklines will stretch to fit you can
also select any sparkline it doesn't
matter which one and the design tab will
appear on the ribbon here you'll find a
wide range of tools that will let you
customize your spark lines in the show
group for instance you can choose to
highlight certain points to make your
spark lines easier to read probably the
most useful ones are High Point and low
point I also like first point and last
point for clearly marking the beginning
and the end of the spark line if we turn
on markers you can see that it
highlights every point which can make
your spark lines look a bit cluttered
and I know there are no negative points
in my data so I'm going to leave this
option alone it may help to choose a
different style for your spark line to
give it more contrast I like this one
because it makes the high point green
and the low point red which should
really make them stand out in the type
group you can change the type of spark
line that you're using in addition to
line column is also a good choice
because it works with most types of data
when loss on the other hand will just
tell us whether the values are positive
or negative it won't show how high or
low they are I don't have any negative
values here so that's not as useful I'm
just going to switch back to column
there's one more thing you should know
about spark lines by default they're
scaled to fit each cell perfectly so
they fill the entire thing notice how
the maximum values look the same in
these two spark lines even though we can
tell from the source data that the
numbers are very different that's the
problem with this feature it makes it
hard to compare one spark line
because they all look so alike in some
cases it can even be misleading luckily
there's a way to counter this all you
have to do is go to the axis command and
look to the minimum and maximum value
options right now they're both set to
automatic and we just need to change
them to same for all spark lines now we
can see that the maximum in this spark
line is much higher than the maximum in
this one compared to traditional charts
spark lines offer a very different
approach to visualizing your data they
make it easy to view and analyze trends
on a more individual basis and can
really help you manage your worksheet