Tag: sparklines

Everything you ever wanted to know about Sparklines in Google Sheets

Sparklines are small, lightweight charts, typically without axes, which exist inside a single cell in your spreadsheets. They’re a wonderful, quick way to visualize your data, without needing the complexity of a full-blown chart.

Google sheets sparkline bar chart

  1. Introduction
  2. Sparkline Examples
  3. Sparkline Syntax
  4. Line Sparklines
  5. Column Sparklines
  6. Bar Sparklines
  7. Winloss Sparklines
  8. Option/value pairs in cells
  9. More advanced examples
  10. Further reading

Introduction

Sparklines were first created by interface designer Peter Zelchenko around 1998. The term “sparkline” was coined by statistician and data visualization legend Edward Tufte.

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10 Techniques for building a Google Sheets Dashboard

You’re probably familiar with using Google Sheets to organize and analyze your data. But did you know you can build a dynamic Google Sheets dashboard to really understand your data?

With a handful of powerful techniques, you can add some pizzazz and dynamism to the presentation of your data. Here are ten tricks to try next time you’re building a Google Sheets dashboard.

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Building a dynamic dashboard for a 3-day digital flash sale

This time last year I worked with The Write Life during their three-day sale of The Writer’s Bundle, a collection of digital products for writers. I built a dynamic dashboard using Google spreadsheets so the team could visually monitor progress throughout the sale.

This year The Writer’s Bundle 2015 was bigger and better than ever, so I wanted to create an even more useful dashboard for the team. The dashboard was a key tool for the team, to monitor both overall and individual sales channel performance, as well as to be a motivating force by giving everyone a visual sense of progress.

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Creating a custom Google Analytics report in a Google spreadsheet

Continuing my recent infatuation with dashboards in Google spreadsheets, I’ve been playing around with the Google Analytics Add-on to build a custom web analytics dashboard in a Google spreadsheet.

The idea originated from discussions with my wife about the tedium of preparing month-end website performance reports for her content management clients. This dashboard was a solution to streamline the monthly web reporting and offer insights that might otherwise be missed. Rather than having to visit Google Analytics for each website in turn and click around gathering the necessary data, this pulls it all together in one place.

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