Bill Jelen: Hey. I’m Bill Jelen from Mrexcel.com. I’ve got a cool excel tip for you today.
Mike Gel Girvin: Hey. This is Mike Gel Girvin at excel is fun in Youtube and I have a different way to do that.
Bill Jelen: Hey. Welcome back. It’s another dueling excel podcast. I’m Bill Jelen from MrExcel. Joining me later is Mike Girvin from Excel is fun. This really isn’t a competition today. We’re just going to both be gushing about a brand new feature in excel 2010.
Now, we’re basing this on the technical preview, the real version of excel 2010 of course will come out of course in early 2010, maybe April or so.
I want to talk about a new feature called Sparlines. So we have some data here, different products and the sales by month and you know, you can look at those numbers but can you really get a feel for whether the things are going up or down.
Here on the insert tab, an excel 2010, they give us new line, column and win/loss sparkline. Let me just cerate a simple one here with a line. I choose my products, I choose the sales and say that I wan a lines, sparkline and the location’s going to be right here next to the data.
Basically, a sparkline is a tiny little word sized chart, Edward Tufty and his books talked about sparkline. And you see now we get this tiny little line charts in each cell. We customize it a little bit. We can say, “Hey we want to mark the high point. We want to mark the low points. We want to mark the last point or the first point.”
And we can change the colors that are used for all those various stuffs, a great way to very quickly create a bunch of very small tiny word-sized charts. It gives people a few whether things are trending up or trending down. Great for the people that may not be numerically oriented so sparklines are one of the cool new features in excel 2010.
Let’s roll over to Mike. Mike will give us some of his thoughts about sparklines.
Mike Gel Girvin: Thanks MrExcel. Oh my heavens. Excel 2010 for doing statistics, just amazing. Some of the new functions, they put in blow my mind. Ah! But sparklines, is totally amazing for statistics.
Here is something I do all the time. I have these data sets and I’m calculating skew to figure out which way the distribution is bendy but then I always make these charts. So if I have five data sets and I’m comparing, I have to use chart wizard five times. Sparklines will just blow this out of the water not only in the speed in which I can do it, but the accuracy of the chart. Because when you make these charts little, they don’t always come out exactly the way you want.
Here’s my data set. I actually took this big data set over here and did frequency. I’m going to highlight this right here. This is when I want to make my column charts. Insert sparklines, column. Now, I have the data arranged. I scroll over and I get my range from my cell charts and click ‘OK’. That is just amazing. Now, if I randomize this data, you can see, boom! Not only did the charts update, but these cell chart sparklines are linked an update, just totally amazing and they look better. Right?
You can see this one’s kind of give you the idea of distribution but it’s not the charts don’t always come out when they’re this small just the way you like them.
So, blows these chart wizards away in terms of speed and in terms of accuracy and how good they look. Sparklines in Excel 2010 is totally awesome. All right, see you next trick.
Bill Jelen: Hey. All right Mikey. That’s excellent whether you’re doing the lines or columns, just a fast, fast way to go to create those little charts and a great feature that’s coming in Excel 2010.
Now, for the MrExcel netcast, this wraps up our week of looking at excel 2010 as we were back to just the regular Q&A. but we’ll take another look. There are more features. I didn’t have the chance to cover this wee and certainly during August we’ll take another look at excel 2010.
So in behalf of Mike and myself, I want to thank you for stopping by. We’ll see you next time for another dueling excel podcast.
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