Word Tips and Tricks

The sparkline concept has been invented by Edward Tufte, the renowned expert for innovative information design. He states that at the heart of the concept are “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”: A sparkline depicts data in miniaturized graphs, such as bars, lines, whiskers and pie charts. A typical application is to depict the history of a value by means of a sparkline which is placed right in front of the current value within a report (e.g. the last months or years of product sales). Readers then have context information (e.g. about a trend or cyclical ups-and-downs in sales) to interpret the current data.

Probably the most remarkable innovation are functions for Excel that generate cell-adherent sparklines automatically and update them dynamically. In Excel XP and 2003 functions like “=Sparkline(cellrange)” generate a sparkline directly in a cell of a worksheet. The word-sized graphs automatically update whenever the underlying data has changed. Hence, information-rich, dynamic controlling instruments are easily designed in Microsoft Excel.

Bissantz SparkMaker 3.0 is free with unlimited functionality for private and academic users while all other users may test it during a 30-day trial period before a valid license has to be obtained. For more details and a downloadable version of SparkMaker 3.0 please visit: http://www.bissantz.com/sparklines/sparkmaker.asp