Based on the examples in Professor Tufte's book, the Excel team decided that the min and max axis values in sparklines should vary from chart to chart. Two simple changes can dramatically improve your sparklines.
Transcript of the video:
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Excel in-depth chapter 33; Sparkline Axis.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I am Bill Jelen.
Well, Sparklines are brand new in Excel 2010 and they're pretty cool, but there's a couple of things you have to be careful about with Sparklines.
Now to create Sparklines, you choose the data that you want to have appear in the Sparklines, we go to Insert, this data would be really good for a Spark column, so I choose Column, and then it wants to know where you want to put the data, all right, so I have 3 rows, 12 columns. I either have to choose 3 cells or 12 cells, and that will tell Excel, which way the data goes. I'll choose three cells right here, click OK.
All right, so these are monthly temperatures, as you can see Chicago, Juneau Alaska and Tucson Arizona, and as you look at it, it's look like Juneau is just as warm as Chicago, and just as warm as Tucson and that is like, "No way, right!" So here's what's going on based on Edward Tufte's book, Tufte had a lot of examples, where he was showing Sparklines different measures, and showing how they trend together over time.
So Microsoft, made that be the default, that you could have different measures here.
But, in this case, these are all temperatures, they're all on the same scale, and so we want to be able to take some control of this, and say, "Hey we want to control the Axis", so with the Sparkline selected, you see, we have Sparkline tools design here.
There's an Axis drop-down, underneath the Axis drop-down, we want to choose Same for All Sparklines both for the Minimum and for the Maximum, same for all Sparklines.
Otherwise, what it's doing is basically showing us the range.
All right, so now we do this and as expected Tucson is the largest month.
Chicago gets warm in the summer but not as warm as Tucson, and then Juneau doesn't get this warm at all.
So that one simple setting, that can really prove...
Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
Excel in-depth chapter 33; Sparkline Axis.
Hey, welcome back to the MrExcel netcast. I am Bill Jelen.
Well, Sparklines are brand new in Excel 2010 and they're pretty cool, but there's a couple of things you have to be careful about with Sparklines.
Now to create Sparklines, you choose the data that you want to have appear in the Sparklines, we go to Insert, this data would be really good for a Spark column, so I choose Column, and then it wants to know where you want to put the data, all right, so I have 3 rows, 12 columns. I either have to choose 3 cells or 12 cells, and that will tell Excel, which way the data goes. I'll choose three cells right here, click OK.
All right, so these are monthly temperatures, as you can see Chicago, Juneau Alaska and Tucson Arizona, and as you look at it, it's look like Juneau is just as warm as Chicago, and just as warm as Tucson and that is like, "No way, right!" So here's what's going on based on Edward Tufte's book, Tufte had a lot of examples, where he was showing Sparklines different measures, and showing how they trend together over time.
So Microsoft, made that be the default, that you could have different measures here.
But, in this case, these are all temperatures, they're all on the same scale, and so we want to be able to take some control of this, and say, "Hey we want to control the Axis", so with the Sparkline selected, you see, we have Sparkline tools design here.
There's an Axis drop-down, underneath the Axis drop-down, we want to choose Same for All Sparklines both for the Minimum and for the Maximum, same for all Sparklines.
Otherwise, what it's doing is basically showing us the range.
All right, so now we do this and as expected Tucson is the largest month.
Chicago gets warm in the summer but not as warm as Tucson, and then Juneau doesn't get this warm at all.
So that one simple setting, that can really prove...
Hey, I want to thank you for stopping by.
We'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
