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Sparklines and Sparkbars - Tiny Charts for Excel

December 25, 2006

In his book, Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte introduced the concept of Sparklines. These are tiny, word-sized graphics that can convey a trendline over time.

These charts are great for executive dashboards or when you need to pack a lot of information into a small space.

In today's episode, I showed a cool product called the Bissantz SparkMaker. This product comes in a free variety and a premium version. With the free version, you can create sparklines in Excel. You can try out the pro version for thirty days. The pro version offers these features:

  • SparkBars:

  • Use of colors:

  • The ability to create sparklines as graphic images or as Excel function. The graphic image allows you to share the workbook with someone who does not have the SparkMaker add-in.
  • The ability to create sparklines through a dialog box. Here, you can specify advanced features such as color, rotation, etc.

Click to check out SparkMaker

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