The charts are dynamic, so as you enter more data or remove data points, the chart gets adjusted automatically (related: Automatically change charts when source data grows / shrinks using OFFSET and Named Ranges). Each sparkline can contain up to 40 data points.The file is capable of generating 10 sparklines, 10 sparklines with high, low points highlighted and 10 win-loss charts.
Download the Excel Sparkline Template:Ĭlick here to download the Excel 2007 version of sparkline template Ĭlick here to download the Excel 2003 version of sparkline template How this sparkline template works? Just copy the sparkline(s) and paste them as images wherever you want. You just enter the data and sparkline will be automatically generated. Using this template is as simple as eating a donut. That is why I created an Excel Sparkline Template. While these methods work fine for a seasoned sparkline maker, what about you and me, who need a sparkline once in a while? Thankfully, there are several good add-ins and open source projects (Fabrice’s fantastic Sparklines for Excel is one) to create small charts in Excel 2007 and earlier.īut almost all the ways of creating sparklines in Excel involve either installing an add-in or running a macro or violently formatting a regular line chart. For earlier versions of Excel (that is 2007 and before) there is no native support for sparkline visualizations. In excel 2010, MS introduced a beautiful feature for creating sparklines from data in spreadsheets.
This Blog Article from Microsoft Office explains how to insert and edit sparklines.Sparkline or Microchart is a tiny little chart that you can place on dashboards, reports or presentations to provide rich visualization without loosing much space. See Vertex42's original article on Sparklines from 2006. Be creative! They're easy enough to add that it's worth experimenting to see if a sparkline will help you analyze your data.
There are many more applications for sparklines. That's all you need to know to get started using sparklines. Instead, once you've selected the sparkline, you'll need to go to the Design tab on the ribbon and click Clear. To delete a sparkline, you can not just select it and push the delete key. One is to mark some of the points, such as the highest and lowest values. You have several customization options here. To edit a sparkline, click on it and choose the Design tab on the ribbon. Then the range should be the same number of columns as your data). (Unless you want to chart columns instead of rows. Pick a range that is the same number of rows as your data. The Create Sparklines dialog box will appear, asking you to choose a location for the sparklines. In the Sparklines group, choose one of the 3 types (Line, Column, or Win/Loss). Then select just the cells with temperature data, not the cells listing the months or the cities. If you want to chart the average monthly temperature in different cities, create a table of the average temperature each month for each city. To create sparklines, you start with a table of numerical data, just like you would with any other chart. Line sparklines help you see data trends and answer questions like these: How much does my data fluctuate? Does it trend upward or downward? What are the high and low points? Here is an example with temperature data for a few cities (sample data from ).Įxample of sparklines showing win/loss records.
Inserting a sparkline using the new Insert > Sparklines feature in Excel 2010+ is much easier.Įxcel 2010+ provides 3 types of sparklines: Line, Column, and Win/Loss. But that takes a lot of time and can be tricky to get the graphs just the way you want them. If you want to, you can make a sparkline with Insert > Chart and take the time to shrink the new chart, re-size the axes, and get rid of all labels. Sparklines are different from other Excel charts because they are smaller, don't have labels, and show only one line of data. Edward Tufte defines sparklines in his book, Beautiful Evidence: " Sparklines are data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics." Sparklines are small, simple charts that are easy to make, easy to understand, and small enough to fit in a single cell alongside your data. Now let's consider the feature in Excel known as Sparklines.
Would you rather wade through a table of data or look at charts? You'll probably say charts, maybe because they help you see data trends and interpret numbers more easily.