

There is a simple way you can impress your boss, co-workers or clients: Use sparkline charts. Have you ever seen these tiny graphs within cells and want to use them too? Sparklines are a fast and elegant way to display your data in Excel. Inserting them into an Excel cell is also quite simple. Here is everything you need to know.
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Example: You want to insert sparklines in column L.
Before we jump right in: This is our example for sparklines charts. You want to insert small column charts in column L. So for example in cell L3 should be a column chart showing the values from cell range C3 to K3.
Insert sparklines with these simple steps in a single cell.
There are basically just five steps for inserting these small graphs an Excel cell. The numbers are corresponding to the picture above.
Insert sparklines in multiple cells at the same time.
Adding sparklines for multiple charts is almost as easy as for a single cell. The only difference: Select the complete cell range. But let’s start from the beginning and go step by step.
That’s it. Of course, you could also add a single chart first and copy and paste it down. But that way, the first sparkline chart (which you copy down) won’t be part of a group (scroll down for more information about sparklines groups).
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Easily change the color of your sparkline chart.
Do you want to change the default color of your sparkline chart? That’s quite easy:
Please note: All grouped charts will change their colors.
Select how to show hidden and empty cells.
How do you want to show hidden and empty cells in sparkline charts? Select the sparklines you want to change and click on “Edit Data” on the left side of the “Sparkline Tools” ribbon. Now you can select between the following options:
Furthermore: You can select how to display hidden cells.
You can also highlight certain values with a different color. For example, you can highlight these values:
Highlight points of your sparkline charts.
The steps are quite simple. After you’ve inserted a sparkline chart, click on it. The “Sparkline Tools” ribbon opens.
Grouped sparklines have one major adavantage: You can edit the data, location, colors and so on simultaneously. On the other hand, you might want to format them individually so that you want to ungroup them.
So here is what you have to do for grouping or ungrouping sparkline charts in Excel.
Group:
Please note: All grouped sparklines have the same type. So if they are not equal (for example one Line and one Column chart type), they will be made the same when grouping.
Group or ungroup sparklines in order to edit them simultaneously.
Ungroup:
Change the source data of sparklines.
Let’s assume that you’ve added some data. Now you want to extend the sparklines to these new cells. Therefore you have to edit the sparkline data.
The familiar window of inserting sparklines opens and you can change the source data.
Set the same or a custom scale for your sparklines.
The condition: The sparklines must be grouped. Once they are grouped, it’s quite straight forward: Select on of the grouped sparklines and click on “Axis” within the “Sparkline Tools” ribbon. Set the tickmark of “Same for All Sparklines” (2x for minimum and maximum values).
There is only one topic left: How to delete sparkline charts. It doesn’t work just to press “Del” on the keyboard.
There are two ways:
Sparklines are easy to handle as they don’t offer as many options as the complicated normal charts. But coming with their simplicity, they just give a rough impression: You should keep in mind that these sparkline charts don’t really let you see their corresponding values.
Many people don’t know sparkline charts. So when finalizing a worksheet, why don’t you try to use sparklines and impress your boss or client?
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Comments 1
Kathy LaBaty
Thanks for the help! Easy to understand and apply. Just what I needed!