One of Uma's main tasks

is to monitor how each account manager is performing over time. She already has a
chart showing
the overall performance but she wants to be able to see the sales
trends for each of them at a glance. A great way to do this
is using sparklines, which is basically a tiny chart
that fits into a single cell. Sparklines can be found in
the insert tab in the ribbon. To insert a Sparkline, you can either
select the data that you want to graph or the cell where you want it to go. Let's
click on cell G21 to get
a Sparkline for Connor Betts and go up to sparklines within the insert tab. Let's
click on Line. And now we need to specify the data range, which are the cells C21
all the way to F21. Now click okay. There you have a mini graph for
Connor Betts which is a Sparkline. This has created a clear
visual trend line. And If you look up in your ribbon we have also now brought up a
brand new ribbon
tab for working just with sparklines. If you need to change your data range,
just click on Edit Data > Edit Single Sparkline's Data and
you can adjust the Sparkline data range. I'm just going to click Cancel. In a large
dataset, we wouldn't have the
time to create individual sparklines for each record. But here's the magic, you
don't need to, sparklines can
be copied using the Fill handle. Click on the Fill handle in cell G21,
and drag it down. Just a note, double clicking the fill
handle does not work with sparklines. And now you can see the sparklines
showing the trend for each of the account managers. When you create sparklines this
way, they're automatically grouped, which means
that if you change one, you change all. For example, click back in cell G21. Let's
change it from a line to a column. Go across to Type and click on Column, and in
one click you can see all
the lines have changed into columns. You can also change the style. Go across to
the style gallery and
browse through a style that you like. Let's change it to a very light blue, and
now we changed all of the sparklines. You can even highlight key values,
using the show check boxes. For example,
we'd like to see the best year for each account manager so
I'm going to check High Point. And there you can see
the highest point for each account manager has now turned green. If you want a
different color,
you can adjust this too, by coming to the marker color and changing
the color by going to High Point and choosing a different color,
let's say, a shade of yellow. If for some reason, you do want to
ungroup the sparklines, for example, Connor Betts as an ideal example which
we want to highlight in different color, we can do that too. Select the spark lines
that we want
to ungroup, so click on cell G21. And go back to your sparkline tab,
and click on Ungroup. Let's change the color so that it's
noticeably different from the others. I'll change that to a shade of orange. And
now you can see the spark line for Connor Betts is completely different
in color from everyone elses. Finally clicking delete will
not remove a sparkline. You need to delete them using
the clear options in the ribbon. Click on clear options and
you'll notice that the sparkline for Connor Betts has disappeared. Undo to get it
back. Sparklines have given Uma
a great visualization tool for monitoring how each account
manager is performing. Make sure you spend some time
getting more familiar with it.