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A sparkline is a mini chart inside a single cell.

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The typical spark line is either a line chart or a column chart and they're great for visualizing data

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trends.

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In this case I have profit information by month for each division and let's visualize this in terms

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of a sparkline.

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I'm going to click on the cell I want to have the spark line in, go to insert, from the sparkline group

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here.

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Let's start with the line sparkline. First off, we need to choose the data that we want.

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What's the data range

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we want to visualize. Well, in the first case I just want this line of data.

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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

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updated the moment new data come in. The location I want to have my sparkline in

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that was the active cell which is fine so click on okay.

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That's my sparkline. Immediately I get a new tab and I have some options I can adjust here.

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One option is for example the line color. You might want to change that.

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You might also want to change the thickness of your lines so you can do that from the weight options

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here.

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You might also want to bring attention to certain data points.

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For example, what's the highest point on this line? Well, it looks like it's the third data point.

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It looks like it's March. To make it faster to read

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we can bring attention to that data point. In the show options,

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put a check mark beside the highest point.

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We can also bring attention to the low point on this chart.

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The colors in this case are both red.

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Let's update them under the marker color.

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Here you can decide the different colors you want to have for the different points we have in the show

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section here.

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For the highest point I want to have a green color.

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I'm fine with the red color for the low point.

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What about negative points?

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Let's also put another color for that.

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Let's go with an orange.

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In this case I don't see any orange.

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Why? I don't have any negative points in this dataset.

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I have some negative points here down on the bottom.

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How do I apply the sparkline to the other lines as well?

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Well I have to do is drag the reference down, just like I would with a formula.

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Now we can see an orange point here.

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If I want to be able to better visualize the trend. I can expand the height of the cells. Because what

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the sparkline does is it tries to fill up the space in the cell.

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What happens if more data come in?

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Let's just copy this and paste it right here.

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The sparkline updates automatically. One important option when working with spark lines are the axis options.

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By default, each sparkline is set to an automatic minimum and an automatic maximum.

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This means you can't compare one of these with the other because each one has their own minimum.

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You can take a look at the trend within that category but you can't compare them with one another.

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If you wanted to compare them to each other you have to set the same minimum and the same maximum for

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all of them.

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Let's do that and see how this changes.

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Let's put the minimum

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same for all spark lines and go back and set the maximum

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same for all spark lines.

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Now we have a different type of visualization.

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We notice that the game division seems to be doing better in comparison to the other two divisions.

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The other thing you notice is that wherever we click anywhere inside the sparkline, everything is selected

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because by default they're grouped together.

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So whatever option you apply to them it's going to apply to all three.

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If you didn't want that and you wanted to have one of these different to the others, you have to ungroup

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your sparklines.

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This way each one can be updated separately.

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I'm just going to press Control+Z to go back. If you wanted to get rid of your sparkline, you just have

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to press the clear option here.

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Now let's just change this to a column chart.

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What if we decided that the line chart doesn't work so great here.

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Let's switch this to a column chart.

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You just have to click on the column type.

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Remember here the access options are set to be the same for all three so we can actually compare them

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and again we can see also with the column chart that the game division seems to be doing better.

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It also seems to be doing very good in the fifth month here. Now the down side of sparklines is that they

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don't have an axis with labels.

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But if you wanted to make it easier to read the sparklines, you can add your own axis with labels.

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All you have to do is to type the axis yourself in a cell and obviously type it in a way that is going

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to fit.

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I can't put like January, February, March.

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But I can put the first letter for every month.

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So J, F, M, and so on.

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And then all you have to do is to fit your access on top of the spark line.

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Now the way I had it.

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Looks like it's a good fit.

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By quickly looking at this, I can tell that the utility division had its highest profit in April and

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the game division it was in May.

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Another option you have under the Axis option is to show the axis.

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That might make it easier to see the negative points.

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You can also plot the data right to left.

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If I wanted to show December first and then November and January last, I choose right to left.

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Otherwise, we can go with the default.

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The third type of sparkline is a win/loss sparkline.

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That's good for visualizing game results. So you can see the positive results and the negative results

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very fast

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with this visualization.

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Okay so that's it.

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That's how you can visualize your data using sparklines.