Thanks to Sam Radakovitz, a Program Manager on the Excel team, for putting together this series on Sparklines. For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics” , as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence . Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing: In the above example, the sales number alone gives you a single moment in time, but adding sparklines in the table, next to the numbers it’s describing, gives history and shows a pattern of sales. The sparklines aren’t floating on the grid of Excel like a chart does. They aren’t rows, column, or sheets away from the data. They are in the table giving context to the numbers, unobtrusively, and appear like text in the cell.
See the original post:
Sparklines in Excel