Sparklines in Google Sheets

Today I learned that Google Sheets has a sparkline feature called "=SPARKLINE". The name is apt. This feature lets you create a trend line of data points over time. I saw this in use in a Google Sheet and loved it. My first thought was "it must have taken a lot of work to make those lines." Then I found out those lines were created with a built-in Sheets function. Isn't that cool? I thought back to all of the time I spent building sparklines for my blog, visible on my home page and category pages, to show trend lines in my publishing. I spent hours thinking through sparklines.

I like sparklines as a way of viewing trends. Being able to include them alongside data in a spreadsheet for illustrative effect is excellent. People interpret information in different ways. While I'm okay looking at numbers, I love visuals to accompany them. Even if I myself could do a task only with a table, the people with whom I may be working at a given time may not feel the same way. I do not have any immediate uses for the sparkline feature but it is one tool I can use to improve how I communicate information in a spreadsheet.

It's amazing how much you can do with a spreadsheet (or in this case, a Google Sheet).

Tagged in sparkline.