Often, we need to input special symbols like €£¥©½» in to our Excel sheets. Now, how do we do that?
Simple, you can use Insert > Symbol to add several different kinds of symbols.
See this animation to understand how you can add symbols to an excel cell. (the file is kind of big, so give it a few seconds to load)
5 Bonus tips on using Symbols:
- You can just double click on the character to insert it. No need to press Insert button.
- You can quickly open insert symbol dialog by pressing ALT+I and then S. (related: 97 keyboard shortcuts to boost your excel mojo)
- You can use the symbols in formulas too. For eg. you can show ? or ? or ? based on change of one value wrt to another. Like this:
- =if(A1>A2, “↑”, if(A1<A2,”↓”,”↔”)) (related: in-cell charts)
- Quickly access symbols to specific to currency, arrows or greek chars (if you are in to that sort of thing) by using the drop-down at top-right (see above demo).
- Change the font to Wingdings / Webdings to see some useful and fun characters. You can spice dashboards or reports with these.
8 Responses to “Introducing PHD Sparkline Maker – Dead Simple way to Create Excel Sparklines”
This looks like it could be very useful for a project I'm putting together right now, thank you so much. Quick & silly question, how do I copy & paste the sparkline as a picture?
Question answered. For anyone else:
Select chart>Hold Shift key & select Edit/Copy Picture>Paste
[...] more information about PHD Sparkline Maker, please read this article and to learn more about Sparklines, read this article from Microsoft Excel 2010 blog. Also there [...]
Am I right in thinking that the y-axis is set automatically by excel?
That makes it possible to get the column chart not to start at zero.
Andy - yes, it is currently set to 'auto', which defaults to a zero base for positive values, but you can change that by left-clicking the chart, then choosing (in Excel 2007):
"Chart Tools/Layout/Axes/Primary Vertical Axis/More Primary Vertical Axis Options"
PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: When manually editing a chart's minimum/maximum axis values, PLEASE be sure there's a valid reason and that doing so won't skew the message shown by the data (e.g. by exaggerating differences). If in doubt, go back and read Tufte. (W.W.T.D.?)
[...] gridlines, axis, legend, titles, labels etc.) and resize it so that it fits nicely in a cell [example]. This is the easiest and cleanest way to get sparklines in earlier versions of excel. However this [...]
thanks for the work creating the template!!!!
looks good