Microsoft Excel 2013 Inside Out

Chapter 21. Using sparklines

• Creating sparklines

• Customizing sparklines

• Removing sparklines

THE charting features introduced in Chapter 19, create graphic objects that can be moved and sized independently from the worksheet. They reside in a graphics layer that lies atop the worksheet grid. In contrast to these familiar chart objects, sparklines, a feature that was introduced in Microsoft Excel 2010, are graphic representations of data that live within worksheet cells. Described by their inventor, Edward Tufte, as “intense, simple, word-sized graphics,” sparklines are ideal for situations in which simplicity and spatial economy matter more than graphic elaboration.

Figure 21-1 provides an example. Each sparkline in cells C3:C11 is a graphic summary ...