Excel: Rotate Sparklines - Here's how
With Sparklines you can nicely illustrate your table values in Excel. This practical tip shows you how you can rotate the small diagrams, for example to illustrate individual values with individual vertical bars.
Excel: rotate sparklines
The Sparklines have been available in Excel since version 2010. They are very useful if you have several different values that you want to display in a single cell with a small diagram.
- The sparklines only work horizontally: you can only display your values in columns or a line that runs from left to right. This makes little sense if you want to display individual values one below the other with a bar.
- You can only rotate the sparklines in their reading direction: If you want to move the last value to the front, click on your sparkline, then on "Draft" at the top and under "Axis" on "Display data from right to left".
- You can implement vertical bars using conditional formatting. We'll show you how in the next paragraph.
Excel: Insert bars with conditional formatting
- Select the cells that contain the values that you want to display with bars.
- On the Start menu, click Conditional Formatting under Styles.
- Here you select "Data bar" and click on "Further rules".
- Now you can choose a bar display. If you want to hide the number in the cell, select the option "Show only bars".
- If you want to display the numbers in the cells next to the bars as with the sparklines, copy the values into the adjacent column and only then carry out steps one to four.
In the next practical tip, we will show you what else you can do with conditional formatting in Excel.