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Excel has built-in data tables and charts. There are situations when you have a large nicely formatted table and you just need to add there little diagrams to envision the trend. Regular charts are too uncomfortable to use, because you would have to give up all the formatting of the excisting data table and create everything anew in the chart. The solution is to use sparklines charts.

So what’s a sparkline? It’s a tiny graphic near the table column or row that helps the reader to grasp the meaning of the numbers quickly.

Sparklines chart

How to make sparkline charts in Excel? This is not a standard Excel functionality, but you can use an Excel add-in. Those are actually macros which create an Excel chart without all the unnecessary attributes (axes, units etc.)

Here is the list of add-in’s from the internet:

TinyGraphs – a free add-in, which can be used to make graphs for a row of data. Open-source macro and installable add-in both available.

http://www.spreadsheetml.com/products.html

SparkMaker – it is not free, but has a free trial. Possibility to make sparklines in Excel, PowerPoint, Word.

http://www.bissantz.com/sparkmaker/index_en.asp

MicroCharts – commercial software

Märt Parker Excel charting, data visualization