Excel 2010: Sparklines, not too shabby

There's been some excitement in the data visualization world about Excel 2010's sparkline implementation (we're an easily excited bunch), and less excitement about a patent application that Microsoft has applied for concerning the sparklines (lots of prior art). Anyway, I've played with them a little - they are pretty robust and for a first implementation, far better than their first attempt at in-cell bar charts in Excel 2007.








There are your standard sparklines (if there is such as a thing), columns, markers on the sparklines, such as high, low, first, last, and a win/loss variant. They are missing banding showing a desirable range of values, but the options for controlling the axes are nice. Something which is very nice is that when you create a single sparkline, and then copy the cell down it treats it as a formula and adjusts the data, but the sparklines are then treated as a group, making editing and axes manipulation very easy.

It will certainly be nice to not have to include macros to allow clients to view sparklines that you've created, but there is still plenty of room for the excellent free and paid sparkline add-ins that exist today.

CNN's Newspulse

CNN recently updated its homepage. I'm not a great fan of how it looks, but they did add 'Newspulse', a listing of the most popular stories. The screenshot is of the tool - they have a smaller add-in for the front page with the top five stores and the bar chart. I'm not sure what the 'popularity' measure is - page clicks I would presume, but it's an interesting slice and dice affair.

I'm not really sure I care about the data - the whole point of the web, as compared to television or radio, is that I get to chose what I consider important, not other people. And if it's popular, surely I've already seen it? Anyway, if you are going to do it then I'd make some changes.






I've just focussed on the charts - there are other changes I'd make to layout. I've kept the bar charts as comparing the relative popularity of stories is of interest, but I've de-emphasized them. I've added sparklines (a type of information graphic characterized by its small size and data density) which show how the popularity of a story has changed over the time period chosen. You can see when a story broke compared to others, how quickly it gained and lost momentum, and whether it's still on its way up, or is old news..