Learn Excel 2011 for Mac

Showing Data Trends with Sparklines

As you saw in Chapter 7, charts are great for illustrating medium to large quantities of information, but sometimes you'll want something smaller—a chart that'll fit inside a single cell, giving a quick visual indication of a trend. Excel calls such charts sparklines.

Excel provides three kinds of sparklines:

• Line. A line sparkline is a straightforward line that runs through the data points, as in the top part of Figure 8–13. A line sparkline is good for showing data that flows from one data point to the next, such as temperatures.
• Column. A column sparkline shows the data as a series of columns, as in a column chart. The middle part of Figure 8–13 shows an example. A column sparkline is good for comparing ...