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.

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Sparklines in Excel