setting Sprites in the Inspector

Unity Engine
1

right now i have been using Texture2D for links to Sprites and using Sprite.Create() to make the sprite at run time.

my question i guess is two folder.

  1. i would like to change this to Sprite instead of Texture2D however it seems when i added a Sprite variable it didn’t show up in the Inspector. how can i get around this?
  2. If that Texture2D is a Sprite and lands on a Sprite Atlas how will that end up in by build/game? will the Texture2D reference the Atlas or do i end up with 2 of the same image in my build?
2

can anyone make a recommendation to be able to use Sprite in the inspector window vs Texture2D?