Chapter 22: Creating Sparkline Graphics
In This Chapter
Introducing the Sparkline graphics feature
Adding Sparklines to a worksheet
Customizing Sparklines
Making a Sparkline display only the most recent data
A Sparkline is a small chart that's displayed in a single cell. A Sparkline allows you to quickly spot time-based trends or variations in data. Because they're so compact, Sparklines are almost always used in a group.
Although Sparklines look like miniature charts (and can sometimes take the place of a chart), this feature is completely separate from the charting feature. For example, charts are placed on a worksheet's draw layer, and a single chart can display several series of data. A Sparkline is displayed inside a cell and displays only one series of data.
See Chapters 19 and 20 for information about real charts.
This chapter introduces Sparklines and presents examples that demonstrate how they can be used in your worksheets.
Note
Sparklines were introduced in Excel 2010. If you create a workbook that uses Sparklines, and that workbook is opened using a previous version of Excel, the Sparkline cells will be empty.
On the Web
All examples in this chapter are available at this book's website. The filename is sparkline examples.xlsx.
Sparkline Types
Excel supports three types of Sparklines. Figure 22.1 shows examples of each, displayed in column H. Each Sparkline depicts ...
