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

temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that quantitatively expresses the attribute of hotness or coldness. Temperature is measurement, measured with a thermometer. It reflects the average kinetic energy of the vibrating and colliding atoms making ...

stock market A stock market, equity market, or share market is the aggregation of buyers and sellers of stocks (also called shares), which represent ownership claims on businesses; these may include ''securities'' listed on a public stock exchange a ...

price, in a simple and highly condensed way. Whereas a typical

chart A chart (sometimes known as a graph) is a graphics, graphical representation for data visualization, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart". A chart can repres ...

is designed to professionally 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. Sparklines are small enough to be embedded in text, or several sparklines may be grouped together as elements of a small multiple.

History

In 1762 Laurence Sterne used typographical devices in his sixth volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to illustrate his narrative proceeding: "These were the four lines I moved through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes,–". The 1888 monograph describing the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa 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. Edward Tufte documented a compact style in 1983 called "intense continuous time-series".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. He introduced the term ''sparkline'' in 2006 for "small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images", which are "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics". Later in 2020, Tufte attributed the idea to Donald Knuth's "METAFONTbook". The first software sparkline was programmed in 1999 by Peter Zelchenko. He introduced "an inline-chart" feature for Mike Medved's QuoteTracker. TD Ameritrade later discontinued QuoteTracker. On May 7, 2008, Microsoft employees filed a patent application for the implementation of sparklines in

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet editor developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows, Windows, macOS, Android (operating system), Android, iOS and iPadOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a ...

2010. The application was published on November 12, 2009, prompting Tufte to express concerns about patent breadth and non-novelty. On 23 January, 2009, MultiRacio Ltd. published an OpenOffice.org Calc extension named "EuroOffice Sparkline". On March 3, 2022, Tomaž Vajngerl implemented sparklines in

LibreOffice Calc LibreOffice Calc is the spreadsheet component of the LibreOffice suite. After forking from OpenOffice.org in 2010, LibreOffice Calc underwent a massive re-work of external reference handling to fix many defects in formula calculations involvi ...

version 7.4, including support for importing sparklines from the OOXML Workbook format.

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 indice ...
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