Sparklines

Traditional charts in Excel may to take up a lot of space on the screen or printed page, but are not the only game in town. Sparklines are tiny charts that appear within worksheet cells, as shown in cells B4:B8 in Figure 9.13:

Figure 9.13 – Sparklines

For instance, you might use Sparklines as part of a dashboard, which is a spreadsheet that communicates a large amount of information in compact form. Let’s first walk through the process of creating each type of Sparkline and then I’ll show you an odd quirk. Follow the next steps:

1. Activate the Sparklines worksheet in the example workbook for this chapter.
2. Select cells F4:I4 and then Insert | Line within the Sparklines group to display the Create Sparklines dialog box.
3. As shown in Figure 9.14, the Data Range setting is prefilled with the range of cells you selected:

Figure 9.14 – Create Sparklines dialog box

Nuance

Often in...