Clearly and Simply

Category: Sparklines XL

  • Sparklines for XL – Chart Gallery updated

    Chart Gallery of Sparklines for XL version 3.3

    Chart Gallery of Sparklines for XL version 3.3 (pdf, 42.3K)

    As a follow-up to my review of Fabrice Rimlinger’s Sparklines for XL, I recently published a post including a download link to the Excel workbook with the chart gallery used in the review article.

    I didn’t provide a download link to the chart gallery in the original post, because I was convinced nobody would be interested in this simple list of Sparklines for XL chart types. What a misjudgment! The Sparklines for XL Chart Gallery is the most popular download here on clearly and simply.

    Recently Fabrice and Nixnut published a new version of Sparklines for XL (3.3 alpha 7), including two new chart types: area charts and horizon charts. I thought you might be interested in an updated version of the chart gallery as well.

    Here is the file for free download:

    Download Chart Gallery Sparklines for XL version 3.3 (Excel 2003, zipped, 382.5K)

    The workbook is an Excel 2003 stand-alone file, i.e. the VBA code is included, no need for installing the add-in.

    Please be advised that I made some minor changes to Fabrice’s and Nixnut’s original implementation:

    • Sub Workbook_open

    I commented out a couple of lines of code to have a stand-alone workbook without asking for installing the add-in and without creating the menus and the toolbar

    • Sub DrawStripeChart() – Class Module StripeChartClass

    I made a minor change of the code, because the shapes have not been grouped to one object with the original implementation

    • Public Function ScaleLineBottomLog – Module Utility

    I changed the first parameter of the function ScaleLine from “t” to “b”

    All of these changes are highlighted by a comment and should be easy to find.

  • You can’t start a fire without a spark (2)

    A Price Benchmarking Tool for Mobile Phones – A Sparklines for XL Showcase

    In my recent review of Sparklines for XL, I announced a second post, providing a real life example of a model and a dashboard using Sparklines for XL. Here it is.

    This showcase is a price benchmarking tool I implemented for a mobile phone retailer. Limited in size (number of products and competitors), but regarding the functionality pretty close to the original implementation.

    This is a screenshot of the dashboard:

    Price Benchmarking Dashboard - click to enlarge

    Since it is a real life example, not all charts and visualizations are sparklines. The showcase uses a combination of different techniques and visualizations to create a professional price benchmarking dashboard. It is not exclusively dedicated to sparklines, but from my point of view this model provides a good impression of how to use sparklines in real life dashboards.

    Interested in getting on fire for a dashboard with Sparklines for XL?

    Here you go.

    (more…)

  • Sparklines for XL – Chart Gallery

    An amendment to “You can't start a fire without a spark (1)” – The Chart Gallery for free download

    Sparklines for XL Gallery - click to enlarge After I recently published the review of Fabrice Rimlinger’s Sparklines for XL, I received a couple of emails from readers asking me for the Excel workbook with the chart gallery. I haven’t thought of providing a download link to this file, because it is a pretty simple workbook, only putting together the most important chart types of Sparklines for XL on one sheet, using dummy data. No explanation of the syntax of the UDFs included, no real life examples and only a very brief description of the chart types. Its only purpose was to create a quick overview of Sparklines for XL.

    Fabrice provides much better and more detailed information on how to use Sparklines for XL with his manual and all the posts and examples on his blog.

    Anyway, if you think my chart gallery workbook would be helpful as well, here is the file for free download:

    The workbook is an Excel 2003 stand-alone file, i.e. the VBA code is included, no need for installing the add-in.

  • You can’t start a fire without a spark (1)

    A Review of Fabrice Rimlinger's Sparklines for XL

    sparkline Please don't be confused by the title of this post. This is not off topic. This post is not about the lyrics of a 25 year old Bruce Springsteen song. It is the first of two posts on using sparklines in professional Business Intelligence dashboards.

    There is more than one way to heat a map recently described – among other techniques – how to use Fabrice Rimlinger's brilliant open source Sparklines for XL to create a 2-dimensional tabular heat map with Microsoft Excel. Back then I announced that I will have one or two more posts dedicated to Sparklines for XL here on Clearly and Simply.

    This is the first one, a brief review of Sparklines for XL.

    (more…)