A sparkline is a mini chart inside a single cell.
The typical spark line is either a line chart or a column chart and they're great for visualizing data
trends.
In this case I have profit information by month for each division and let's visualize this in terms
of a sparkline.
I'm going to click on the cell I want to have the spark line in, go to insert, from the sparkline group
here.
Let's start with the line sparkline. First off, we need to choose the data that we want.
What's the data range
we want to visualize. Well, in the first case I just want this line of data.
I'm also going to take into account the months I don't have data in yet because I want to have my spark line
updated the moment new data come in. The location I want to have my sparkline in
that was the active cell which is fine so click on okay.
That's my sparkline. Immediately I get a new tab and I have some options I can adjust here.
One option is for example the line color. You might want to change that.
You might also want to change the thickness of your lines so you can do that from the weight options
here.
You might also want to bring attention to certain data points.
For example, what's the highest point on this line? Well, it looks like it's the third data point.
It looks like it's March. To make it faster to read
we can bring attention to that data point. In the show options,
put a check mark beside the highest point.
We can also bring attention to the low point on this chart.
The colors in this case are both red.
Let's update them under the marker color.
Here you can decide the different colors you want to have for the different points we have in the show
section here.
For the highest point I want to have a green color.
I'm fine with the red color for the low point.
What about negative points?
Let's also put another color for that.
Let's go with an orange.
In this case I don't see any orange.
Why? I don't have any negative points in this dataset.
I have some negative points here down on the bottom.
How do I apply the sparkline to the other lines as well?
Well I have to do is drag the reference down, just like I would with a formula.
Now we can see an orange point here.
If I want to be able to better visualize the trend. I can expand the height of the cells. Because what
the sparkline does is it tries to fill up the space in the cell.
What happens if more data come in?
Let's just copy this and paste it right here.
The sparkline updates automatically. One important option when working with spark lines are the axis options.
By default, each sparkline is set to an automatic minimum and an automatic maximum.
This means you can't compare one of these with the other because each one has their own minimum.
You can take a look at the trend within that category but you can't compare them with one another.
If you wanted to compare them to each other you have to set the same minimum and the same maximum for
all of them.
Let's do that and see how this changes.
Let's put the minimum
same for all spark lines and go back and set the maximum
same for all spark lines.
Now we have a different type of visualization.
We notice that the game division seems to be doing better in comparison to the other two divisions.
The other thing you notice is that wherever we click anywhere inside the sparkline, everything is selected
because by default they're grouped together.
So whatever option you apply to them it's going to apply to all three.
If you didn't want that and you wanted to have one of these different to the others, you have to ungroup
your sparklines.
This way each one can be updated separately.
I'm just going to press Control+Z to go back. If you wanted to get rid of your sparkline, you just have
to press the clear option here.
Now let's just change this to a column chart.
What if we decided that the line chart doesn't work so great here.
Let's switch this to a column chart.
You just have to click on the column type.
Remember here the access options are set to be the same for all three so we can actually compare them
and again we can see also with the column chart that the game division seems to be doing better.
It also seems to be doing very good in the fifth month here. Now the down side of sparklines is that they
don't have an axis with labels.
But if you wanted to make it easier to read the sparklines, you can add your own axis with labels.
All you have to do is to type the axis yourself in a cell and obviously type it in a way that is going
to fit.
I can't put like January, February, March.
But I can put the first letter for every month.
So J, F, M, and so on.
And then all you have to do is to fit your access on top of the spark line.
Now the way I had it.
Looks like it's a good fit.
By quickly looking at this, I can tell that the utility division had its highest profit in April and
the game division it was in May.
Another option you have under the Axis option is to show the axis.
That might make it easier to see the negative points.
You can also plot the data right to left.
If I wanted to show December first and then November and January last, I choose right to left.
Otherwise, we can go with the default.
The third type of sparkline is a win/loss sparkline.
That's good for visualizing game results. So you can see the positive results and the negative results
very fast
with this visualization.
Okay so that's it.
That's how you can visualize your data using sparklines.