First a quick personal update: We (Jo, kids & I) are in beautiful Virginia Beach. Yesterday, we had a perfect, lazy beach day. We woke up late, went to beach where kids played in sand. Got back to our house (rented thru airbnb) when it started raining, had lunch and took a nap. We got up and went to beach again, rode a family bike, watched several street performances, bought souvenirs, ate Thai food and drove home at 11. Long story short, we are having way too much fun and I feel like cheating on you by not posting anything Excel. So,
I have a poll for you.
What do you use Excel Tables for?
I will go first, I use them for,
- Maintaining all my raw data, so that I can use structural references
- Maintaining various trackers, for example I am tracking all our expenses in USA in a table.
- For quick formatting of data (zebra lining, filters, sorting etc.)
What about you? What kinds of data are you holding in tables and how are you using them. Please share using comments. Go.
Learn: Introduction to Tables, Introduction to structural references.
PS for our US readers: Have an enjoyable 4th of July & weekend. We are driving to Washington DC to celebrate the day with our friends and watch fireworks at National mall.
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