Sparklines are in-cell charts in Microsoft Excel that are easy to create and extremely helpful, but they can be more insightful with just a few specific settings.

Sam Radakovitz developed a feature called “sparklines” for Microsoft Office Excel 2010 that lets users transform large amounts of data into small, at-a-glance displays that fit into a single cell.

In Excel 2010, Microsoft implemented three different types of sparklines. It is easy to add line chart, column charts, or win-loss charts for every row in a data set.

You can quickly highlight the trends by using sparklines, which are mini graphs of selected data. In the Excel screenshot below, for example, the sparklines in Column F are mini line graphs showing ...

VIDEO: Adding mini charts in the cells of your spreadsheet is great feature, which was added to Excel in 2010 but still remains massively underutilized.

With the awesome power of sparklines, you can condense 20 PowerPoint slides into one. And what's more, Excel 2010 can do it for you. Let's take a look at an example.

An curved arrow pointing right. Sparklines are word-sized charts that live in individual cells. This great feature was added to Excel in 2010 but still remains massively underutilized. Produced by ...