A sparkline is a small chart, that doesn”t have axes or coordinates. It gives a representation of variation of a certain parameter. Normal charts are bigger in size, with a lot of explanatory features such as title, legend, data labels etc. and are set off from the accompanying text. Sparkline on the other hand is small in size and can be embedded inside the text, or a worksheet cell that has its context.

Feature of Sparkline was introduced by Edward Tufte in 1983. Microsoft introduced sparklines in Excel 2010. We can find sparkline option in the insert ribbon of Excel software.

Sparklines are of three types −

• line − Similar to line chart

• column − Similar to column chart

• win_loss − Whether each value is positive (win) or negative (loss).

Working with XlsxWriter Sparklines

XlsxWriter module has add_sparkline() method. It basically needs the cell location of the sparkline and the data range to be represented as a sparkline. Optionally, other parameters such as type, style, etc. are provided in the form of dictionary object. By default, the type is line.

Example

Following program represents same list of numbers in line and column sparklines.

import xlsxwriter

wb = xlsxwriter.Workbook(''hello.xlsx'')
ws = wb.add_worksheet()

data=[12,23,9,17,31,3,7,21,10,15]

ws.write_row(''A1'', data)
ws.set_column(''K:K'', 40)
ws.set_row(0, 30)
ws.add_sparkline(''K1'', {''range'':''Sheet1!A1:J1''})

ws.write_row(''A5'', data)
ws.set_column(''K:K'', 40)
ws.set_row(4, 30)
ws.add_sparkline(''K5'', {''range'':''Sheet1!A5:J5'', ''type'':''column''})

wb.close()

Output

In cell K, the sparklines are added.

The properties are −

• range − is the mandatory parameter. It specifies the cell data range that the sparkline will plot.

• type − specifies the type of sparkline. There are 3 available sparkline types are line, column and win_loss.

• markers − Turn on the markers for line style sparklines

• style − The sparkline styles defined in MS Excel. There are 36 style types.

• negative_points − If set to True, the negative points in a sparkline are highlighted.

Example

The following program produces a line sparkline with markers and a win_loss sparkline having negative points highlighted.

import xlsxwriter

wb = xlsxwriter.Workbook(''hello.xlsx'')
ws = wb.add_worksheet()

data=[12,23,9,17,31,3,7,21,10,15]
ws.write_row(''A1'', data)
ws.set_column(''K:K'', 40)
ws.set_row(0, 30)

data=[1,1,-1,-1,-1,1,1,1,-1,-1]
ws.write_row(''A5'', data)
ws.set_column(''K:K'', 40)
ws.set_row(4, 30)
ws.add_sparkline(''K1'', {''range'':''Sheet1!A1:J1'', ''markers'':True})
ws.add_sparkline(''K5'', {''range'':''Sheet1!A5:J5'', ''type'':''win_loss'',
''negative_points'':True})

wb.close()

Output

Line Sparkline in K1 has markers. The sparkline in K5 shows negative points highlighting.

Example – Style Types

Following code displays a series of numbers in column sparkline. Ten different style types are used here.

import xlsxwriter

wb = xlsxwriter.Workbook(''hello.xlsx'')
ws = wb.add_worksheet()

data=[12,23,9,17,31,3,7,21,10,15]
ws.write_row(''C3'', data)
ws.set_column(''B:B'',40)

for i in range(1,11):
   ws.write(i+4,0, ''style {}''.format(i))
   ws.add_sparkline(i+4,1,
   {''range'':''Sheet1!$C$3:$L$3'',
   ''type'':''column'',
   ''style'':i})
   
wb.close()

Output

It will produce the following output −