When I was in Perth, I visited Hui’s house one day. Lovely, Hui’s daughter (who is about 14) asked Hui how he knew me. Hui told that we both share a passion for Excel and thats how we got to know each other. Then she asked, What is Excel?
At this point, we both tried to explain what Excel is to her in a few ways with no success. Later Hui came up with a brilliant explanation.
He said, Excel has lots of small calculators all interconnected, so that you can do any sort of calculation.
So here is a challenge for you. How would you explain Excel to a small kid (or someone who never heard about it).
Share your answers using comments.
Go ahead and be funny, outrageous, creative or elaborate. Say something.

















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