Excel Dashboards and Reports for Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

Sparking Inspiration with Sparklines

In This Chapter

Understanding the Excel Sparkline feature

Adding sparklines to a worksheet

Customizing sparklines

Working with groups of sparklines

This chapter introduces you to sparklines. These magically named visualizations are essentially mini word-size charts placed in and among the textual data in tables. Sparklines enable you to see, at a glance, trends and patterns within your data using minimal real estate on your dashboard.

Before getting into the nuts-and-bolts of using sparklines, you should understand exactly how they can enhance your reporting. This chapter introduces you to the concept of sparklines and then shows you how to customize and add them to tables.

Introducing Sparklines

As I mention in Chapter 3, much of the reporting done in Excel is table-based, in which precise numbers are more important than pretty charts. However, in table-based reporting, you often lose the ability to show important aspects of the data such as trends. The number of columns needed to show adequate trend data in a table makes it impractical ...