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Create Smart Data Insights with Excel 2010

(Chapter 2: Summarize Your Data Easily)

Create Smart Data Insights with Excel 2010


Chapter 1: Start Out with Excel 2010 Chapter 2: Summarize Your Data Easily Chapter 3: Illustrate Information Effectively Chapter 4: Use Slicer to Show Data Your Way Chapter 5: Work Anywhere with Excel 2010 Helping others understand the information you presentwhether you work with words, numbers, pictures, or mediais a key part of success in any business environment. The big story in Microsoft Excel 2010 includes new features that help you convey your findings in ways others can easily understand. Sparklines are small, cell-sized charts you can add to your worksheet to provide a visual summary of the data in selected ranges; new icon sets and improvements to data visualization options give you greater variety in the way you present information; SmartArt and charting enhancements offer additional flexibility; and slicers enable you to graphically slice-and-dice your PivotTable to display just the information you want to show at any given time. And Excel 2010 also includes new offerings for the high-end spreadsheet user: new formulas, support for spreadsheets with millions (yes, millions) of rows, and the integration of SharePoint 2010 and Excel Services, which enables you to publish worksheets and dashboards to your intranet or to the Web.

Summarize Your Data Easily


Your worksheets enable you to organize, track, and calculate financial information over time. An important part of making sense of the data you gatherand sharing what you findinvolves communicating the results in a way others can easily understand.

Sparklines are small, cell-sized charts that appear within your worksheet, giving readers a quick picture of what the numbers on the worksheet mean. Because sparklines stay with your data (unlike a chart, which might appear in a section of the worksheet some distance from the data it reflects), they show clearly the relationship among the data values used to create them. You can create three kinds of sparklines in Excel 2010. The program offers you the choice of line, column, or win/loss sparklines: Line sparklines show trends and changes in values over time. Column sparklines enable you to compare values. Win/loss sparklines enable you to analyze values in relation to a norm.

Step by Step: Add Sparklines to Your Worksheet


Heres how to summarize your data easily with sparklines. You can add sparklines at any point in your worksheet where you want to show data trends, comparisons, or summaries. Here are the steps to add sparklines and customize them to meet your needs: 1. Open a worksheet or create a new worksheet in Excel 2010. If you are creating a new worksheet, enter the data you want to use as the basis for the sparklines. Click and drag to select the cells that include the data you want to show in the sparkline. Click the Insert tab, and click the type of sparkline youd like to create: Line, Column, or Win/Loss. The Create Sparklines dialog box shows the range of cells you selected in the top data field.

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Click in the Location Range field of the Create Sparklines dialog box, and then click the cell on the worksheet where you want the sparkline to appear. Click OK. The sparkline is added to the document. Click the elements in the Show/Hide group of the Sparkline Tools Design tab to customize the appearance of the sparkline you added. As you click your choices, new points are added to the examples in the Style gallery, as shown here:

10. Click the Sparkline Color arrow to display the palette and set the color of the sparkline. 11. Click the Marker Color arrow to choose the color of the markers displayed on the sparkline. 12. After you set the sparkline formatting options as you want them, you can copy and paste the sparklines to other cells in the worksheet. Excel will update the references to show the correct sparkline representation in the cell.

Valid till 31st May 2012

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