Sparklines in Excel

Sparklines in Excel

UPDATE: It seems Microsoft is trying to patent sparklines, so says Edward Tufte himself.  See here for further legal discussion.  Not as tidy as once thought.

Microsoft’s Sam Radakovitz on Excel 2010’s sparkline feature:

For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence.  Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing.

Any self-respecting data/information nerd knows how valuable sparklines are.  In my former life where displaying application performance data at dashboard and report levels was the Next Big Thing, the addition of sparklines to those dashboards and key reports were huge.

(By the way, if you’re not familiar with Edward Tufte, you should be. He’s an information design icon.)

Here’s what sparklines look like:

Excel sparklines

Incredibly information-dense graphics that tell a story otherwise impossible given the practical limits of space and reader comprehension.  I personally know a few people who will love these as much as their own children.  (Readers Chris and Larry know who they are.)

(Via Michael Tsai)

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