I didn’t notice that autocorrect had changed “Sparkling” to “Sparkling” in the original text!

If you use Google Sheets, here’s an amazingly useful function you might not know about. It’s called Sparkline. Suppose you want to get an idea of how your students are doing over time. You could analyse their grades by looking at the numbers, of course. You could also generate a graph of the full data.

However, what Sparkline does is give you a little graph in an individual cell. Have a look at the screenshot below to see what I mean.

As you can see, I’ve created a spreadsheet of students’ grades for 6 assignments. You will notice that in the Trend column each student’s grades is summarised, in effect, by a graph. I think you will agree that this provides a very nice visual representation of what has happened over time.

The formula for Sparkline is =sparkline(B2:G2) for the first student in this example spreadsheet. All I did was copy it down in the usual fashion.

Incidentally, the names were generated from the quick name random generator, and the grades were generated using the formula =randbetween(0,100). That returns a random number between 0 and 100.