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Hi Reader,

Welcome to the Google Sheets Tips newsletter #368, your Monday morning espresso, in spreadsheet form!

I finished reading a fascinating book last week, Home on the Canal, a long-out-of-print history of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the stories of the people who lived and worked along it. Today, I live beside the canal, now a beautiful National Historic Park, and cycle or walk on the restored towpath most weeks.

Riding across the Antietam Aqueduct recently, I paused to imagine it in its heyday, over a century ago: full of water, conveying a 90 ft canal boat, loaded with 120 tons of coal, pulled by two mules. Maneuvering this heavy, lumbering boat through the narrow aqueduct was hard work. I picture the boat captain and mule driver shouting back and forth to keep the boat away from the aqueduct walls. Speed, if you can call it that at 3 miles-an-hour, was of the essence as Captains were only paid upon successful delivery of their goods to Washington, DC.

Families often lived onboard their boats for nine months of the year, until the canal froze each winter. For 92 hard years, this was their way of life. But one-too-many destructive floods and the rise of the railroad doomed the canal. The last delivery happened in 1923 and the canal never reopened for the 1924 season. Overnight, a way of life disappeared.

Now, when I travel the towpath, it's more than just a quiet path through the woods. It's a walk through history, with stories at every turn.

What do you walk or drive past every week that has forgotten stories to tell?

And before we get to this week's Google Sheets tip, I want to also take a moment to welcome storytelling with data as this week's sponsor of the newsletter. The founder, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, wrote a data visualization book of the same name, storytelling with data, 10 years ago.

To this day, it remains one of the most influential work books I've read. It gave me a rock solid foundation in the principles of data visualization and I can't recommend it enough if you create charts as part of your job.

➜ News

I'm running a Black Friday Sale this week.

Get 20% off all my courses this week through Cyber Monday.

There will be no Google Sheets Tips newsletter next week because our inboxes will be busy enough with Cyber Monday emails.

See you again on 8th December with newsletter #369.

Brought to you by: storytelling with data Celebrate 10 years of storytelling with data Join bestselling author Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic on December 2nd for a free live virtual session celebrating the 10th anniversary of the international bestseller storytelling with data: a data visualization guide for business professionals. Cole will reflect on timeless lessons that have shaped data storytelling over the past decade, sharing updated examples, new insights, and practical tips to help you create more powerful graphs and presentations. Register today!

➜ Sheets Tip #368: Sparklines

In this tip, we're looking at sparklines, which are miniature charts that exist inside a single cell.

We generate them with the SPARKLINE function, which is probably my favorite function in Google Sheets!

(Editor: Wait... what? You have a favorite function in Google Sheets?!?

Me: Of course! Don't you?

Editor: No! Normal people don't have favorite functions...

Me: I disagree. Folks, help me settle the debate 👉

Ok, that's quite enough of that silliness.)

Suppose we have this list of signups to our mailing list, a mix of good days (positive numbers) and bad days (negative numbers, when more people unsubscribed):

Looking at these numbers alone, it's hard to see the big picture.

This is where sparklines shine. It's a quick way to add a mini chart to show a trend.

They're not meant to be full blown charts with labeled axes, titles, or legends. They're a quick way to show a trend without taking up much space in your Sheet.

To add a simple sparkline chart, we use this formula:

Let's convert it from a line chart to a column chart by adding an option inside curly brackets:

We can add more options, like highlighting the largest value, separated by semi-colons:

We can highlight the negative numbers:

And we can even add a horizontal axis to more easily see the positive/negative split:

Notice how option/value pairs are separated by commas. Multiple options/value pairs are separated by semicolons.

Here's a practical example of a stock tracker with sparklines to show a 60-day history:

​Learn more about Sparklines​

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend who might enjoy it.

Have a great week!

Cheers,
Ben

P.S. Inconvenient objects​