Memo Date: July 11, 2016 To: From: Re: Clergy and Chancery, Parish and School Staff Tom Hardy, Director, Office of Information Technology How to Use Sparklines in Excel Have you ever had a worksheet of data in Excel and quickly wanted to see the trend in the data? Maybe you have test scores for your students or revenue from your company over the last 5 years. Instead of creating a chart, which takes time and uses an entire worksheet, small mini-charts in a single cell can be helpful. Excel 2010, 2013 and 2016 have a feature called sparklines that let you create mini-charts inside a single cell. You can add sparklines to any cell and keep it right next to your data. This allows you to quickly visualize data on a row by row basis. Please see the attached document for more details. If you have any questions or need additional information, please contact the Help Desk using the information below. Help Desk 404.920.7450 support@archatl.com
How to use Sparklines in Excel Excel 2010, 2013 and 2016 have a cool feature called sparklines that let you create mini-charts inside a single cell. You can add sparklines to any cell and keep it right next to your data. This allows you to quickly visualize data on a row by row basis. It s just another great way to analyze data in Excel. Let s take a look at a quick example. In the data below, there s a list of revenue from ten stores over the last six quarters. Using sparklines, one can quickly see which stores are increasing revenue and which stores are decreasing. Obviously, you have to be careful when looking at data using sparklines because it can be misleading, depending on what numbers you are analyzing. For example, if you look at Store 1, you see that revenue went from $56K to about $98K and the trend line is going straight up. However, if you look at Store 8, the trend line is very similar, but the revenue only went from $38K to $44K. Sparklines doesn't show data in absolute terms. Please note that the created graphs are just relative to the data in that row. For comparison purposes, a normal Excel chart was created (see below) using the same data. Here, you can clearly see how each store performs in relation to the others.
In this chart, Store 8 is pretty much a flat line as compared to Store 1, which is still a trending up line. This shows that data can be interpreted in different ways depending on your display choice. Regular charts help you see trends between many rows or data and sparklines let you see trends within one row of data. There is a way to adjust the options so that the sparklines can be compared to other rows as well, which is covered later in this document. Create a Sparkline So, how do you create a sparkline? In Excel, it s really easy. First, click in the cell next to your data points, then click on Insert and choose between Line, Column, and Win/Loss under Sparklines.
Pick from any of the three options depending on how you want the data displayed. You can always change the style later on, so don t worry if you re not sure which one will work best for your data. The Win/Loss type will only make sense for data that has positive and negative values. A window should pop up asking you to choose the data range. Click on the little button on the right and select one row of data. Once you have selected the range, go ahead and click on the button again.
Now click OK and your sparkline or tiny chart should appear in that one cell. To apply the sparkline to all the other rows, just select the bottom right edge and drag it down just like you would a cell with a formula in it. Customizing Sparklines Now that we have our sparklines, let s customize them! First, you can always increase the size of the cells so that the graphs are bigger. By default, they are pretty tiny and can be hard to see properly. Click on any cell with a sparkline and then click on the Design tab under Sparkline Tools. Starting from the left, you can edit the data to include more or less columns. Under Type, you can change the type of mini chart you want. Again, the Win/ Loss is meant for data with positive and negative numbers. Under Show, you can add markers to the graphs like High Point, Low Point, Negative Points, First & Last Point and Markers (marker for every data point).
Under Style, you can change the styling of the graph. Basically, this just changes the colors of the line or columns and lets you choose the colors for the markers. To the right of that, you can adjust the colors for the sparkline and the markers individually. The other important aspect of sparklines is the Axis options. If you click on that button, you ll see some options called Vertical Axis Minimum Value Options and Vertical Axis Maximum Value Options.
If you want to make the sparklines relative to all the other rows instead of just its own row, choose Same for All Sparklines under both headings. Now when you look at the data, you ll see that you can compare the charts in terms of absolute values. Viewing the charts in column form makes it easier to see the data when comparing all sparklines. As you can see, the columns in Store 1 are much higher than the columns for Store 8, which had a slight upward trend, but with a much smaller revenue value. The light blue columns are low and high points because those options were checked.