Excel Sparklines, Part Two

 - In the last lesson, you saw how to add a Sparkline to a cell. In this lesson, you'll learn how to format your Sparklines.

You can liven up your Sparklines by clicking on the Design ribbon at the top of Excel. You'll then see five panels: Sparkline, Type, Show, Style, and Group. To add markers to your Sparkline, click on the Show panel. Check the box for Markers:

When you check the Markers box, your Sparklines will look like this:

You can change the style of your Sparkline via the Style panel on the Design ribbon:

Expand the Style options by clicking the down arrow in the bottom right:

Select a style that takes your fancy:

Changing the Colour of Sparklines

You can change the colour of your Sparkline by clicking the Sparkline Color option on the Style panel:

You'll then see a dropdown list of colour options:

As well as selecting a colour, you can change the thickness of your Sparkline by clicking the Weight option at the bottom:

The Marker colours can be changed, too. Click on Marker Color, just below Sparkline Color. Expand the Markers option:

Select a colour for your markers. Click More Colors for an expanded colour palette.

You can change the Sparkline type from the Design tab, too. Click on the Type panel, then Column:

Your Sparklines will then look like this:

Click back on the Line option, if you don't like Columns.

When you format the background cell from the Home ribbon, you can really bring your Sparklines to life:

Sparklines give you a nice visual representation of your data. From the Sparklines above, you can quickly see that Lisa is progressing well, and that John's scores are plummeting rapidly. We need a word with this boy!

In the next ;esson, you'll learn how to use images as the bars or columns for your charts. This can really add sparkle to your graphs!.