MicroCharts, A Different Take on Excel Charting
By Zach Gemignani
September 7, 2006
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excel
reporting
Like an overcooked steak, reporting can be dry, bland, and not particularly easy to digest. A typical example delivers the goods in a simple table and shows trends as a percentage change from the previous month or year.
"Sparklines" to the rescue! Edward Tufte describes sparklines as:
"data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics." 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 precisely where appropriate.
Check out how we can embed a tiny trending line into this same report:
Now with a quick scan, you can get a sense for the trend over the last 12 months. Bringing Sparklines from concept to reality is a Excel add-in put together by Andreas Flockermann of BonaVista Systems. His MicroCharts tool lets report-makers create these little graphics; any recipient can view the images as long as they have installed a free MicroCharts font. Here are a few example of the types of charts you can make:
I spent a little time playing with his beta version and found it fairly intuitive. There is a chart format dialog box that helps you set various dimension including scale, colors, and reference lines. Like all charting in Excel, it takes some playing around to really understand how to control the result.
Andreas says he started his new company to "help users to create better, richer reports with more information per square inch than integrates well into Microsoft technology." It is a worthy goal.
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12 comments | Show all comments only the last 5 are shown
david said:
How do you compare this add-in with the one discussed a while ago? (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=152)
Zach said:
The two offerings in the area are Bissantz SparkMaker (http://www.bissantz.de/sparklines/sparkmaker.asp) and BonaVista Systems' MicroCharts (http://www.bonavistasystems.com/Products_SparkLiner_Overview.html). I honestly haven't spent enough time with both of these products to give you a fair sense of the differences or a recommendation.
James Taylor said:
Very cool. As a fanatic user of Excel these is very nice.
Henk said:
BonaVista did a very good job here! It seems more elaborated than Bissantz': more options and more flexibility. Indeed, my passion Dashboard + Excel will get a new boost.
Zach said:
Here's a nice comparison of the two sparkline products: http://thinkingpictures.blogspot.com/2006/09/sparkline-generators-for-excel.html
Martin said:
This looks nice, the fact that recipients need to have a special font installed to view the charts would cause issues for me though.
I've tried creating some 'micro charts' in Excel 2007 using the standard chart features and it works pretty well. Just delete all the 'junk' and resize it to the size of a few cells (holding the ALT key works nicely when doing so).
It'll probably require more resources but the file will be viewable by anyone with 2007. Just a thought...
DBM Forum » Blog Archive » Tool Tip: MicroCharts en SparkMaker said:
[...] Al met al lijkt het me leuk speelgoed voor dashboard designers. Zie ook het artikel op Juice Analytics en een op Excel Geek. [...]
Jon Peltier said:
Here's another approach to sparklines by Fernando Cinquegrani:
http://www.prodomosua.eu/zips/sparklines.xls
It's pure Excel, with no need for VBA, special fonts, or any of the usual overhead associated with these techniques.
Jesper said:
As Marin pointed out it might be a drawback that users need to have a special font installed to view the charts, although there are some advantages to this approach as well.
It is fairly easy to setup a macro that creates sparklines-like graphs using the standard Excel charts. I've been testing some concepts around this (see http://www.bloggpro.com/nanocharts-enables-excel-in-cell-charts-with-sparklines-concept/)
and plan to create my own "Sparklines" add-in eventually as I like them alot for visualization.
John said:
I've been looking around for a microchart product.
In particular, I need something like the following:
-----A-----B----> (representational only but parts of the line would have different colours, values could be shown and markers instead of a, b .
Its a simple representation of a budget line where A would represent an actual value, b a budget value in time and the line total value for overall budget, YEE.
It's a simple representation that I though I could find somewhere but have not. Any ideas? I need a lot of these on a page and this concept to me would work.
Thanks,
John
Carlos said:
It looks fine but i saw another tool called Mini Charts for Excel ... Thanks to its internal structure and encoding Mini Charts allows you to categorize databases in Excel or large pieces of data using dynamic tables.
http://www.xprssdesign.com/minicharts_for_excel/minicharts_for_excel.htm
DaveG said:
John:
You could check out Stephen Few's bullet graph - designed for exactly what you want(eg actuals vs budget +- 10%).
See wikipedia for details & here for an Excel implementation.
http://www.exceluser.com/explore/bullet.htm
Enjoy,
Dave
said:
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