Experiments with Excel Sparklines
Posted by John Stokdyk in Excel on Wed, 09/09/2009 - 16:15
- New Excel 2010 feature brings data visualisation into the mainstream
- Show performance grahpics within worksheets or Excel 2010 dashboards
- Fast and easy to use, once you know where to look
- Other Sparkline add-ins already exist
Microcharts within your spreadsheets will be incorporated within the next release of Excel. John Stokdyk looks at what Sparklines could add to your reporting arsenal.
After doing a quick tour of the new layout in the Excel 2010 Technical Preview, the first thing I wanted to look at more closely was the new Sparklines micro-charting feature that has been added.
Not bothering to be detained by any of the help or training materials, I selected a block of sample data, clicked the Insert tab, selected a line-based micro chart option from the Sparklines button and then scrolled down the adjacent column to define where the lines should appear.
Within a second or two, a set of in-cell graphical indicators appeared alongside each row of the relevant data. In place of the lines option, I could also have chosen Columns or Win/Loss formats from the Sparklines drop-down menu.
A table of figures needs to be carefully interpreted to extract meaning - once you represent the numbers as bar charts or trendlines, their meaning becomes so much clearer.
However my early experiments with a sample of Fantasy Football data bumped into a couple of frustrations. The measurement trend I wanted to show was best displayed by Sparklines, but it soon became evident they were based on a relative scale that blurred rather than clarified the players’ relative performances. The axis characteristics needed to be tweaked in a separate Design tab on the menu ribbon.
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