#Create sparklines in excel 2007 download

Various formatting tools can then be used to quickly change colours, show or hide markers and highlight highs or lows, first and last point and so on. So you build one in a cell, choosing the data range that it relates to, and then you can use the usual вЂњfill downвЂќ technique by dragging a cell handle to create more sparklines for subsequent rows of similar data.

The way these are shown in the videos is that they are much easier to apply to a range of cells rather than having to build then copy and paste for multiple rows, adjusting data ranges and so on. Of course, you could already do this with add-ins or just a lot of patience to customise normal charts to suit the restricted size of a typical sparkline. Now Excel 2010 does sparklines straight out of the box, no add-ins required, which is a testament to how popular these kind of dense data visualisations have become, especially in the BI and business dashboard community. Another popular use is to track success and failure, such as wins and losses for a sports team, a technique described well by this article on sparklines at Bissantz, the creators of SparkMaker, an add-in for Excel. While lines are by far the most common choice for sparklines, especially to show changes over time, other formats may be found вЂ“ columns to show breakdown of a total by category for comparison, for example. Although this example is show here in quite a large screenshot, the trend is very clear at much smaller sizes too. Some people might prefer to show the figures to the right of the sparkline as they relates to the final data point and therefore the right hand end of the plotted line, but this is a matter of personal preference. The example to the right shows the previous 12 months sales and target, with the highest and lowest sales figures highlighted. Lines may have key points highlighted (high value, low value, last value), show a trendline or normal band, but otherwise will be deliberately uncluttered to aid easy interpretation.

The term was coined by information visualisation guru Edward Tufte and discussed in a whole chapter in his book Beautiful Evidence, which describes sparklines as вЂњintense, simple, word-sized graphicsвЂќ.Д®xamples might include past share values, commodity prices, exchange rates, or internal business key performance indicators. Sparklines are very dense microcharts used to display simple information, usually showing historical values to give context to the current data. Today letвЂ™s have a look at probably the most eagerly awaited extension to ExcelвЂ™s data visualisation capabilities вЂ“ sparklines. This covers two new features вЂ“ sparklines (from the start) and slicers (from about 1min 55 into the video)ДЄs more information emerges, IвЂ™ll write in more detail about some of the new features.

#Create sparklines in excel 2007 download

On the Microsoft PressPass videos page there is an Excel 2010 demo video which you can also download (16MB wmv file). On the official Office 2010 site there is a video by Albert Chew, Product Manager for Office, which shows off some of the new features of Excel 2010 (sorry, no direct link to the video available, itвЂ™s linked in the menu on the left of that page).

The Excel team are starting to blog a bit more now that the Technical Preview is underway their 10,000 foot view is a good starting point to find out whatвЂ™s coming, or you can read the press release. As discussed previously, we have some marketing information about what we will be seeing in the next release of the Office system, but not really a great deal of technical information.