Colin's gang map, and CMOM's recent encounter with the Rock Star of Graphs, sparked a recent discussion about Tufte, which reminded me of something I'd been meaning to try: sparklines.

Starting this year, I've been tracking several variables for the DonorsChoose New York region on a weekly basis. You know, "what gets measured, gets managed" and all that. Namely, how many proposals are submitted by teachers, how many are posted to the website, how many complete their funding that week, and how much money has come in overall. Up until now, it's just been a list of numbers on a spreadsheet that I have tacked up to the wall of the office. But thanks to this nifty sparklines tool I can create mini-graphs for each variable. It requires .NET and the installation of their custom fonts. The tool will not only create sparkline images, but also a dynamic Excel function so as you add data the sparkline changes.

Just for fun, here's a sparkline graph of the number of postings on Ishbadiddle, by month, since January 2001. I grabbed the data from here, threw it into a spreadsheet, and out pops this:

The grey bar is one standard deviation; the red point is the minimum (May 2001, one post) and the blue the max (June 2005, 99 posts.)

Update: Since Chris asked, here are some other sparkline formats of the same data:

M E-L posted this on August 29, 2006
It is filed under Computers & Internet

It is also indexed with the following tags: Tufte Alert | Design | Sparklines | Freeware |