33. Using Sparklines

Edward Tufte wrote about small, intense, simple datawords in his 2006 book, Beautiful Evidence. Tufte called them sparklines and produced several examples where you could fit dozens of points of data in the space of a word. Six months later, the Excel team began planning for Excel 2010, and Tufte’s concepts made it into that version.

Fitting a Chart into the Size of a Cell with Sparklines

Excel’s implementation of sparklines offers line charts, column charts, and a win/loss chart. Figure 33.1 shows an example of each:

Win/Loss—The 1951 Pennant Race (in rows 7 and 8) shows two examples of a Win/Loss chart. Each event (in this case, a baseball game) is represented by either an upward-facing marker (to indicate a win) or a ...

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