SPARKLINES

Nowadays, for any organization “DATA” is a key for any strategic decision making, budgeting, campaigning and advertising. Organizations spend crores of rupees to maintain their customer database… be it a bank, financial institution or FMCG company. But having only enough data is not sufficient. It has to be interpreted and analyzed proficiently for making these decisions full proof.

Excel is software which helps us to analyze and interpret this data with graph option. But, sometimes too many graphs in same worksheet or workbook hangs excel or desktop. This can be avoided by using an option of “SPARKLINES”.

“SPARKLINES” is an option which is mini version of “CHARTS” option, which allows us to draw graph in a single cell. A sparkline is a very small chart that is typically drawn without axes or coordinates. It presents the general shape of the variation (typically over time) in some measurement in a simple and highly condensed way. This option is readily available in Excel 2010 version but, to use it in earlier versions you have to enable it through add-in option. Go to Office button(left corner) > Excel Options > Add-Ins > Excel Add-ins > Go… >  Browse (File sparklines.xls) and option will be added automatically.

To draw it select data values and type of sparkline (Column, line).