an extremely simple technique

August 19, 2006 6:58 PM

Lightweight data exploration: simple, sparkline-esque graphs in Excel.via infosthetics.
posted by signal (15 comments total)

Good find signal.
posted by Ynoxas at 7:15 PM on August 19, 2006

sparklines! Brilliant. I had not seen that notion before.
posted by cortex at 7:17 PM on August 19, 2006

Wow. I'd never heard of sparklines before. Brilliant. Thank you.
posted by kalessin at 7:20 PM on August 19, 2006

Glad you like. For those who've not seen sparklines before, take a look at this, and download this.
posted by signal at 7:42 PM on August 19, 2006 [1 favorite]

Exceptionally valuable - you just helped me to solve a project-mgmt quandary I was starting to feel hopeless about.

Thank you!
posted by batmonkey at 7:43 PM on August 19, 2006

Totally sweet.
posted by odinsdream at 7:57 PM on August 19, 2006

Brilliant, brilliant tool. I'd only seen it used before for baseball stats. Thanks!
posted by loquax at 8:12 PM on August 19, 2006

signal's tool is insanly helpful! Thanks.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:17 PM on August 19, 2006

Yes yes yes yes yes. So yes.
posted by everichon at 9:28 PM on August 19, 2006

I love posts that give me two or three additions to my bloglines subscriptions. Top one.
posted by nthdegx at 5:02 AM on August 20, 2006

Actually I saw this on the Internet about 40 years ago, before Excel was invented blah blah blah
posted by kcds at 7:55 AM on August 20, 2006

Useful, thank you.
posted by paduasoy at 8:55 AM on August 20, 2006

Also, for added fun, try "special" characters (via charmap in windows, for example: U+2588 and U+25A0 are particularly effective).
posted by aberrant at 12:52 PM on August 20, 2006

I believe Tufte credits the concept behind the sparkline to Galileo. Or something like that.

BTW: Tufte this morning on WeSun.
posted by lodurr at 2:26 PM on August 20, 2006

I've been a biostatistician for 30 years and have admired and used Tufte's work. The man is a genius.
posted by Mental Wimp at 12:00 PM on August 21, 2006