Sparklines are tiny, word-sized charts that can appear in a cell. Excel 2010 makes it easy to create sparklines. In Episode 1070, Mike & Bill show you several examples in Excel 2010.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Bill Jelen: Hey welcome back it's another dueling Excel podcast.
I'm Bill Jelen from MrExcel, joining me later is Mike Girvin from Excel Is Fun.
This really isn't a competition today we're just going to both be gushing about a brand new feature in Excel 2010.
Now we're basing this on the technical preview the real version of Excel 2010 will come out of course in early 2010.
We're saying Q1, maybe April or so.
I want to talk about a new feature called SPARKLINES?
So we have some data here different products and sales by month and you know you can look at those numbers but can you really get a feel for whether things are going up or down.
Here on THE INSERT TAB in Excel 2010 they give us new line column and win-loss SPARKLINES, let me just create a simple one here with a line, I choose my products, I choose the sales and say that I want a line SPARKLINE and the location is going to be right here next to the data.
Basically a SPARKLINE is a tiny little word size chart.
Edward tufted and his books talked about SPARKLINES and you see now we get these tiny little line charts in each cell, we can customize it a little bit we can say hey we want to mark the high point, we want to mark the low point, we want to mark the last point or the first point, and we can change the colors that are used for all those various thoughts.
Great way to very quickly create a bunch of very small tiny word size charts gives people a few whether things are trending up or trending down, great for the people that may not be numerically oriented.
So, SPARKLINES is one of the cool new features in Excel 2010.
Let's throw it over to Mike; Mike will give us some of his thoughts about SPARKLINES.
Mike Grivin: Thanks MrExcel, all my heavens Excel 2010 for doing statistics just amazing some of the new functions they put in blow my mind.
Ah!
But, SPARKLINES totally amazing for statistics here's something I do all the time.
I have these data sets and I'm calculating skew to figure out which way it's the distribution is benny.
But, then I always make these charts so if I have five datasets that I'm comparing it, I have to use chart wizard five times.
SPARKLINES will just blow this out of the water, not only in the speed in which I can do it, but the accuracy of the chart because when you make these charts little they don't always come out exactly the way you want.
Here's my datasets, I actually took this big data set up here and did frequency.
I'm going to highlight this right here; this is what I want to make my column charts out of, insert SPARKLINES column.
Now I have the data range I scroll over and I get my range for my cell charts and click OK.
That is just amazing if I randomized this data, you can see boom not only do the charts update but these cell chart SPARKILES are linked and update, just totally amazing and they look better, right you can see this one is kind of gives you idea the distribution, but it's not the charts don't always come out when they're this small just the way you like them.
So blows these chart Wizards away in terms of speed and in terms of accuracy and how good they look.
SPARKLINES and Excel 2010 totally awesome, All Right see you next trip.
Bill Jelen: Hey, all right Mike yeah that's excellent, whether you're doing the lines or columns just a fast way to go to create those little charts and a great feature that's coming in Excel 2010.
Now, for the mystery Excel netcast this wraps up our week of looking at Excel 2010.
Next week we're back to just the regular QA But, we'll take another look there's more features I didn't have a chance to cover this weekend, certainly here during August will take another look at Excel 2010.
So I'm Mike myself I want to thank you for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another dueling Excel podcast.
I'm Bill Jelen from MrExcel, joining me later is Mike Girvin from Excel Is Fun.
This really isn't a competition today we're just going to both be gushing about a brand new feature in Excel 2010.
Now we're basing this on the technical preview the real version of Excel 2010 will come out of course in early 2010.
We're saying Q1, maybe April or so.
I want to talk about a new feature called SPARKLINES?
So we have some data here different products and sales by month and you know you can look at those numbers but can you really get a feel for whether things are going up or down.
Here on THE INSERT TAB in Excel 2010 they give us new line column and win-loss SPARKLINES, let me just create a simple one here with a line, I choose my products, I choose the sales and say that I want a line SPARKLINE and the location is going to be right here next to the data.
Basically a SPARKLINE is a tiny little word size chart.
Edward tufted and his books talked about SPARKLINES and you see now we get these tiny little line charts in each cell, we can customize it a little bit we can say hey we want to mark the high point, we want to mark the low point, we want to mark the last point or the first point, and we can change the colors that are used for all those various thoughts.
Great way to very quickly create a bunch of very small tiny word size charts gives people a few whether things are trending up or trending down, great for the people that may not be numerically oriented.
So, SPARKLINES is one of the cool new features in Excel 2010.
Let's throw it over to Mike; Mike will give us some of his thoughts about SPARKLINES.
Mike Grivin: Thanks MrExcel, all my heavens Excel 2010 for doing statistics just amazing some of the new functions they put in blow my mind.
Ah!
But, SPARKLINES totally amazing for statistics here's something I do all the time.
I have these data sets and I'm calculating skew to figure out which way it's the distribution is benny.
But, then I always make these charts so if I have five datasets that I'm comparing it, I have to use chart wizard five times.
SPARKLINES will just blow this out of the water, not only in the speed in which I can do it, but the accuracy of the chart because when you make these charts little they don't always come out exactly the way you want.
Here's my datasets, I actually took this big data set up here and did frequency.
I'm going to highlight this right here; this is what I want to make my column charts out of, insert SPARKLINES column.
Now I have the data range I scroll over and I get my range for my cell charts and click OK.
That is just amazing if I randomized this data, you can see boom not only do the charts update but these cell chart SPARKILES are linked and update, just totally amazing and they look better, right you can see this one is kind of gives you idea the distribution, but it's not the charts don't always come out when they're this small just the way you like them.
So blows these chart Wizards away in terms of speed and in terms of accuracy and how good they look.
SPARKLINES and Excel 2010 totally awesome, All Right see you next trip.
Bill Jelen: Hey, all right Mike yeah that's excellent, whether you're doing the lines or columns just a fast way to go to create those little charts and a great feature that's coming in Excel 2010.
Now, for the mystery Excel netcast this wraps up our week of looking at Excel 2010.
Next week we're back to just the regular QA But, we'll take another look there's more features I didn't have a chance to cover this weekend, certainly here during August will take another look at Excel 2010.
So I'm Mike myself I want to thank you for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another dueling Excel podcast.
