
Sparklines in Excel
Imagine you have a result sheet for your students over the last 5 years and want to create a chart in Excel, which takes time. In that case, you are thinking if only there were some small mini-charts in a single cell. Well here is the solution.
Sparklines are an excellent way to show in a small space the trends or variations in a large volume of data. Excel 2010, 2013 and 2016 have a cool feature called sparklines that basically lets you create sparklines i.e. mini-charts inside a single Excel cell called ‘Sparklines’. You can add sparklines to any cell and keep it right next to your data. In this way, you can quickly visualize data on a row by row basis. It’s just another great way to analyze data in Excel.
What are sparklines?
Unlike charts on an Excel worksheet, sparklines are not objects — a sparkline is actually a tiny chart in the background of a cell.
Why use sparklines?
Data presented in a row or column is useful, but patterns can be hard to spot at a glance. The context for these numbers can be provided by inserting sparklines next to the data. Taking up a small area, a sparkline can display a trend based on adjacent data in a clear graphical representation. You can quickly see the relationship between a sparkline and its underlying data, even when your data changes you can see the respective changes in the sparkline immediately.
Case Study: In this example, we will use a database of an electronics shop that contains profits from each product for the last 5 months. We want to see the trend of profit of the particular product beside it. How can we do this?
Answer: Using Sparklines!
How to Create Sparklines in Excel
Here are the steps to insert a line sparkline in Excel
- Create a table in an excel sheet
- Click on the cell G2 in which you want the sparkline and go to Insert tab.
- In the Sparklines Group click on ‘Line’.
- ‘Create Sparklines‘ Dialog box appears.
- Now in Data Range select range B2: F2 from row
- Now click OK & you will get Sparklines in excel
Now we will get the sparkline showing the trend of the values included in row 2 as shown above.
Do Step 2 to Step 5 again for the rows 3-6. Then our table will look like the image above.
Tips on How to create sparklines for the rest of the rows:


Please do highlight the steps . Otherwise it is explained properly with the help of images.