Excel Sparklines are tiny charts that are embedded in a single cell and provide a simple, but effective, way to represent trends and patterns in your data. Sparklines provide a quick and easy way to see patterns and trends in your data without having to create a separate chart.

Sparklines are different from traditional Excel charts in several ways:

1. Size: Sparklines are much smaller in size compared to charts, making it easy to see trends and patterns in your data without taking up a lot of space on your worksheet.

2. Integration with cells: Sparklines are embedded in a single cell and are linked to the data in that cell, making it easy to update the chart as your data changes.

Traditional Excel charts are still more powerful and flexible and should be used when you need to represent more complex data sets or when you need to display multiple series of data. I have personally found Sparklines to be challenging to fully understand the insights in my datasets but can be an effective way to understand high level trends very quickly.