Excel 2010: Sparklines, not too shabby

There's been some excitement in the data visualization world about Excel 2010's sparkline implementation (we're an easily excited bunch), and less excitement about a patent application that Microsoft has applied for concerning the sparklines (lots of prior art). Anyway, I've played with them a little - they are pretty robust and for a first implementation, far better than their first attempt at in-cell bar charts in Excel 2007.








There are your standard sparklines (if there is such as a thing), columns, markers on the sparklines, such as high, low, first, last, and a win/loss variant. They are missing banding showing a desirable range of values, but the options for controlling the axes are nice. Something which is very nice is that when you create a single sparkline, and then copy the cell down it treats it as a formula and adjusts the data, but the sparklines are then treated as a group, making editing and axes manipulation very easy.

It will certainly be nice to not have to include macros to allow clients to view sparklines that you've created, but there is still plenty of room for the excellent free and paid sparkline add-ins that exist today.