A sparkline is a very small line chart, typically drawn without axes or coordinates. It presents the general shape of the variation (typically over time) in some measurement, such as

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that expresses quantitatively the perceptions of hotness and coldness. Temperature is measurement, measured with a thermometer. Thermometers are calibrated in various Conversion of units of temperature, temp ...

or stock market price, in a simple and highly condensed way. Sparklines are small enough to be embedded in text, or several sparklines may be grouped together as elements of a

small multiple A small multiple (sometimes called trellis chart, lattice chart, grid chart, or panel chart) is a series of similar graphs or charts using the same scale and axes, allowing them to be easily compared. It uses multiple views to show different parti ...

. Whereas the typical chart is designed to show as much data as possible, and is set off from the flow of text, sparklines are intended to be succinct, memorable, and located where they are discussed.

History

In 1762

Laurence Sterne Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768), was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric who wrote the novels ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'' and '' A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy'', publishe ...

used typographical devices in his sixth volume of

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'', also known as ''Tristram Shandy'', is a novel by Laurence Sterne, inspired by '' Don Quixote''. It was published in nine volumes, the first two appearing in 1759, and seven others follow ...

to illustrate his narrative proceeding: "These were the four lines I moved through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes,–". Sparkline of the narrative structure of the first three volumes of Tritram Shandy, accouring to the author

Sparkline of the narrative structure of the first three volumes of Tritram Shandy, accouring to the author

The 1888 monograph describing the 1883 eruption of the

Krakatoa Krakatoa (), also transcribed (), is a caldera in the Sunda Strait between the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Indonesian province of Lampung. The caldera is part of a volcanic island group ( Krakatoa archipelago) comprising four islands. T ...

shows barometric signatures of the event obtained at various stations around the world in the same fashion, but in separate plates (VII & VIII), not within the text. Screenshot of Sparklines in Medved QuoteTracker, 1998

Screenshot of Sparklines in Medved QuoteTracker, 1998

In 1983,

Edward Tufte Edward Rolf Tufte (; born March 14, 1942), sometimes known as "ET",. is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design ...

had formally documented a graphical style, then called "intense continuous time-series", encouraging extreme compaction of visual information.Tufte, Edward (1983). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Quoted in "ET Work on Sparklines". Retrieved from http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=000AIr. In early 1998, interface designer

Peter Zelchenko Peter may refer to: People * List of people named Peter, a list of people and fictional characters with the given name * Peter (given name) ** Saint Peter (died 60s), apostle of Jesus, leader of the early Christian Church * Peter (surname), a sur ...

introduced a feature called "inline charts", designed for the PC trading platform Medved QuoteTracker. This is believed to be the earliest known implementation of sparklines. In 2006, the term ''sparkline'' itself was introduced by

for "small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images". Tufte described sparklines as "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics". On May 7, 2008, Microsoft employees filed a patent application for the implementation of sparklines in

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for App ...

2010. The application was published on November 12, 2009, prompting Tufte to express concern at the broad claims and lack of novelty of the patent. On 23 January, 2009, MultiRacio Ltd. published an

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

extension "EuroOffice Sparkline" to insert sparklines in OpenOffice.org Calc. On March 3, 2022,

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. The LibreOffice suite co ...

developer Tomaž Vajngerl announced a new implementation of sparkline for LibreOffice Calc, including the support to import sparklines from

OOXML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version a ...

Workbook format, and this is landed at 7.4 release.

Usage

Sparklines are frequently used in line with text. For example:

The
Dow Jones Industrial Average The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), Dow Jones, or simply the Dow (), is a stock market index of 30 prominent companies listed on stock exchanges in the United States. The DJIA is one of the oldest and most commonly followed equity inde ...
for February 7, 2006 .

The sparkline should be about the same height as the text around it. Tufte offers some useful design principles for the sizing of sparklines to maximize their readability.

References

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History

Usage

See also

References

Further reading