Sparklines and Bullet Charts Oh My!

The num­ber of tools, add-ins and routines to gen­er­ate your own data visu­al­isa­tions seems to be evolving very quickly. I use the single little spark stats Word­Press plug-in to keep track of post fre­quency on Ran­do­mos­ity. when I first was play­ing with spark­lines, I down­loaded a share­ware ver­sion of Bis­santz Spark­Maker plug-in for excel and there was also a sim­ilar higher cost tool avail­able from Microcharts. I know that Bis­santz has been con­stantly tweak­ing his tools and they have become more power­ful. They are nice tools and should com­mand a pay­ment. I cer­tainly do not begrudge. Microcharts seem to have evolved even faster. I happened to be doing a little walk­about to see where things in the data viz arena were at and when I saw the latest Microcharts/Pro, have to admit to being floored.

Microcharts Pro offers a wide range of highly cus­tom­iz­able spark­lines inspired by Edward Tufte’s work as well as the increas­ingly pop­u­lar bul­let chart from Stephen Few (I will admit to being rather fas­cin­ated by the bul­let chart right now). Microcharts is aimed at the dash­board developer and provides a way to rap­idly imple­ment an effect­ive digital dash­board. They offer a Stand­ard and Pro product that open up a huge vari­ety of ways to rep­res­ent data as their tag line says.. “through charts reduced to the max.” There are demo ver­sions of products avail­able from both Bis­santz and Bonav­ista Systems.

I will have to try the latest ver­sions and see how the evol­u­tions actu­ally empower the user. As with any such tool, know­ing how to best har­ness the tool and be able to decide on what visu­al­isa­tion is most appro­pri­ate to the mes­sage still remains the key. I am reminded, most simplist­ic­ally, of all the resumes writ­ten using Apple’s kid­nap letter-like San Fran­cisco font in 1984, simply because they could. Books such as Few’s ‘Inform­a­tion Dash­board Design’ or Nie­der­man and Boyum’s ‘What the Number’s Say’, are two use­ful tools to thought­ful data presentation.

Update: Note the revised Microcharts pri­cing that Andreas Flock­er­mann for­war­ded as a com­ment. Like Spark­Maker, there is a free ver­sion for edu­ca­tional and not for profit use. Hope­fully appre­ci­ation of the value of these tools will incent users to upgrade to the Pro versions.