Working with Sparklines in Microsoft Excel

Michael Belfry1 CommentMicrosoft Excel

Sparklines are tiny charts that represent your data in a single cell. They’re useful for quickly analyzing numbers in your spreadsheet to identify trends. Take a look at the Country Fruit Stand spreadsheet below. Did apple sales increase or decrease? If we add sparklines, identifying trends will be simple.

To add sparklines in Excel (2010 or 2013):

  1. Click the Insert tab.
  2. Select one of the buttons in the Sparklines group. For this example, I’ll choose “Line”.

  1. In the Create Sparklines dialog box, click in the Data Range box then drag to select cells H7:J10 in your worksheet.
  2. For Location Range, drag to select M7:M10 then click OK.

Here is the finished product:

A quick glance at the sparklines shows us that apple and orange sales have increased, while banana sales have fallen. What do you think? Would you use sparklines in your spreadsheets? Answer in the comments below. : )