These look like very useful new features. I liked using the conditional formatting in 2007, but never could work out how to get them out of Excel, ie to get data bars in a Word table. Do you know of any way to do so?

Cheers,
James

I haven’t tried recording a sparklines macro yet. It was getting late and I was approaching a deadline (bedtime).

Does the Excel 2010 Visual Basic Editor pick up actions when working with Sparklines? It would be good if the actions were picked up properly so we could learn the new object syntax, unlike how charting worked in 2007.

“Show Axis” did nothing that I could see. I could plot left-to-right, and it seemed that changing to a date scale also worked (though I didn’t try hard to break it).

I wouldn’t say that “serious” analytics is out of the question. As always, you’d need careful planning, and probably some clever VBA. If you need to extend your sparklines, since it’s contained in the formatting of the cell, you can just fill the cell down or right as needed.

I like how Sparklines work with tables – very much like a calculated column. Refreshing a table from an external data source automatically adds new Sparklines to the “calculated column.” Alas, although you can fake out Sparklines in a PivotTable, it’s all pretty much a manual process to update, configure for different fields etc. In other words, any serious visual analytics is pretty much out of the question.

Despite seeing axes on Sparklines in the Excel Blog postings, I haven’t been able to display them at all. After selecting the “Show Axis” option, I don’t see any axis displayed in the cell(s). Is this option working for you?

I had experimented with “real” charts as sparklines. You can do it in Classic Excel if you give yourself some margin, by making the chart object no less than about four rows high, making the plot area one row high, and positioning the chart object so the plot area overlies the cell. Pain in the neck, but that’s why Bill Gates invented VBA. 2007 made this a bit easier by removing the margin, the several pixels all around the chart area that are inaccessible in Classic Excel, and by allowing the whole chart to shrink to a cell’s height and still show its contents. But other issues with 2007 charting limited my experimenting there. Your mini charts are interesting.

Fernando Cinquegrani, who does some amazing graphics in Excel, experimented in Excel 2003, using Camera images of charts shrunk down to cell size. This was pretty interesting, though using more than half a dozen or so camera objects in a worksheet is asking for trouble. I don’t see this example on his web page.

And I don’t know about the tags.I’d like to get threaded commenting hooked up too, one of these days.

For instance, I’ve posted a picture of an implementation of in cell graphs and some closeups at http://cid-f380a394764ef31f.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/.Public?uc=3 – (the relevent picture files all start with MJ or MU)

With this kind of functionality, I can only imagine that sparklines would help make this kind of functionality easier for the average user, but might not add much (if anything) to a more advanced user. Its possible the new sparklines functionality might actually suck compared to what you can do with incell graphs. Your thoughts?

PS…is it possible to use tags when writing comments here? (And if so, which ones, and how do we use them)

Regards