Excel User Group
Microsoft Excel blogs, forums, files. Read, ask questions, provide answers.
The Excel Team Blog » All Tags » Sparklines (RSS)

Browse by Tags

  • Apollo 11 & Excel 2010 – Watch History Reimagined for a chance to win

    That got us thinking - what would it have been like if Excel had been around back then? How might things have been different? Then we thought - what better moment in time to illustrate the point than the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. I mean, it literally is Rocket Science. So, we decided to create a video to see how Excel might've helped the team at NASA work through some of the tensest moments in American history. Have a look and see what you think. Better yet, after watching the film, enter...

  • Free training: Take the next steps in growing your Excel skills

    In early May, we told you about the new video series Excel Skills Builder in our post " Take the first step in growing your Excel skills ." In that post, we announced the launch of lesson 1. Well, we've finally finished the rest of the lessons, and wanted to share this great resource with you! As a reminder, the skills builder is a video series that comprises short (typically under 5 minutes each) videos that give you an overview of a task or feature in Excel. The videos are grouped...

  • Easy budget management with Excel

    In post #8 in the Ten Days of Office series, we're celebrating the one-year anniversary of the release of Office 2010 by providing you with tips and tricks to get the most from your Office experience. In today's economy, smart money management is a necessary skill. Whether managing the family budget , planning college expenses , or budgeting for your upcoming wedding , Microsoft Excel can help you track the latest numbers, even while on the go with Excel Mobile 2010 on your Windows Phone...

  • Format column sparkline charts using the data axis and cell merging

    Sparkline charts are great, but there may be times they need a little visual massaging to maximize their usefulness. Consider this scenario: You have a system for which you want to track downtime over the course of a year and (fortunately) it had downtime events in only four of twelve months. Here's how to use and format sparkline charts to show this data effectively. ...( read more ) Read More...
    Filed under: ,

  • Sparklines: tiny charts show the big picture

      Today’s blog post is brought to you by Judi Hurlock, who writes Excel online training for Office.com.   I write free training courses for Office.com. My job is to learn new features, and the tried and true, and to pass that learning on to you. Recently I heard about a new feature in Excel 2010 called sparklines. I couldn’t tell just by the name what the feature was. But when I found out that a sparkline is a tiny chart, the proverbial light bulb turned on, and I realized this was something...
    Filed under: ,

  • How it's Made: Tower Defense - a Game in Excel 2010

      This blog post is brought to you by Karen Cheng a Program Manager on the Excel team.     In today's post, we'll show you how the arcade game Tower Defense was created in an Excel spreadsheet (see a video of the game being played here ).  In this game, creeps move toward your castle. You must defend it by placing towers which shoot at the creeps. The more creeps you kill, the more money you get to buy and upgrade your towers. To play, you'll need - · To download the...

  • One More Sparkline Trick

    In this blog post I’ll walk through one more interesting way you can use sparklines in Excel 2010. In the above example we have the sales for each book category and for each store. While you can’t see the exact numbers in this view, you can get the feel for which sections sell well at the different stores. Let’s see how this is made with sparklines in Excel: There are actually 24 sparklines in the picture above; each one is bound to a single data point in a similar table with the numbers. You can...

  • A Sparkline Trick - Using the Horizontal Axis as a Reference Line

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the ways you can use sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: In the above example we have the data for the employee sign-up contest, this is a contest where employees try to get customers to sign-up for a bookstore club card. The contest has gone on for several weeks now, and each employee has a goal of 20 sign-ups per week. Right now the sparklines are conveying the history of sign-ups for each employee, for example...

  • Sparklines – Lining Up the Points

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the ways you can use sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: In the above example we have sales for each year, the cost of sales, and net profit for that year all divided by the category of book. One of the things you can do with sparklines in Excel 2010 is to stick them in cells above or below each other and have the points line up. Doing this will allow you to see trends for multiple fields in a related way. Here...

  • Sparkline Axis Options

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the axis options for sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: The above sparklines are displaying the number of books by category for each month. The sparklines in this example are giving the history of the count of books for each category, and it looks like they are at their lowest over the past half year or so. Let’s take look at the axis options for these sparklines. Selecting the sparklines gives you a sparkline...

  • Formatting Sparklines

    In this blog post I’ll walk through formatting sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: The above sparklines are displaying the net profit by month for the three book stores in 2008. The net profit number alone can tell you which stores are doing well, but the sparklines help identify trends behind the number: Seattle and Houston both dipped in the summer, in general their profits climbed as the year went on, and Richmond didn’t do well until the last month...

  • Adding Some Spark to Your Spreadsheets

    In this blog post I’ll walk through creating sparklines in Excel 2010 using a sample table from the book store demo file: In the table we have the sales for the month of June: a column for total sales for the month, multiple columns for each day’s sales, and rows that break out different book categories. Sparklines will really be able to enhance the table and add to the understanding of the numbers by plotting out the month’s sales day by day in a single column, in line with the data. To get started...
Copyright Excel User Group and the relevant contributors, 2010. All Trade Marks acknowledged. This site is a peer-to-peer site and NOT affiliated in any way to Microsoft Corp. All rights reserved.