Glossarist’s Weblog

Bissantz SparkMaker 4 uses a new “minimized-clicks” approach which helps you automatically condense your data into sparklines (mini-graphs).

Sparklines, a concept invented by Edward Tufte, compress large amounts of data into intense, word-sized graphics, such as:

• A company’s revenues over time as a bar chart 5.7 Mio.

• An exchange rate over several years as a line 1.30

• Survey results as pie charts 70 %

Bissantz SparkMaker 4 is an add-in for Microsoft® Office that creates sparklines to visualize numerical data in dashboards and spreadsheets, reports and presentations created with Excel®, Word® and PowerPoint®.

Excel functions for dynamic sparklines

A set of user-defined functions for Excel XP, 2003 and Excel 2007 (new) lets you generate sparklines that automatically update whenever data has changed. With simple expressions like “=Sparkline(…)”, you can create cell-adherent, dynamic sparklines directly in the cells of your Excel sheets. With these in-cell mini-graphs, it is possible to design information-rich, dynamic controlling instruments for your business by adding concise visualization to your reports and analyses.

New user interface

SparkMaker dialog

Dynamic reports and dashboards in Excel

Below, an example of a monthly sales report features net revenues for several product categories and sparklines are used to show the history of the last twelve months of revenues. This report clearly illustrates that notebook sales have decreased significantly and require management attention.

Export sparklines to an HTML ticker

SparkMaker allows you to directly export sparklines to an HTML ticker. Define the sparklines in your SparkMaker dialog and create an HTML document automatically that you can integrate into your web site. For instance, enhance your intranet with current figures of your company’s performance, thus create awareness for controlling figures and distribute information in your company in a non-intrusive way using only a small portion of your screen real estate.

Stationary PCs Portable PCs Monitors

Multi-color sparklines

Two variants of functions for sparklines are provided by Bissantz SparkMaker: single-color and multi-color sparkline functions. The benefit of single-color functions is that their result is displayed in the same cell in which the function itself is located. However, such functions do not allow to highlight subsections of a sparkline with different colors or display numerical values adjacent to the sparkline. For these purposes, SparkMaker offers multi-color sparkline functions which require two cells: one for the result (your sparkline) and one for the formula.

Trend indicators for sparkline functions

Supplementary insight into your data is optionally provided by trend arrows that geometrically depict the course of the figure. You can now use these statistically grounded indicators in your dynamic sparkline functions (multi-color only).

Formats

The sparklines are generated either from specifically crafted TrueType Fonts (TTF), the Bissantz SparkFonts, or as images. Choose between several sparkline types and styles, add numerical data, customize colors and export sparklines to popular graphic formats like BMP, GIF, JPG or PNG. The data to be shown in such images can be read from the current document, pasted from the clipboard, or edited in a textbox within the SparkMaker dialog.

New sparkline font

Bissantz SparkMaker 4.0 employs TrueType Fonts to generate sparklines, the so-called SparkFonts invented in 2005 by Bissantz & Company. Just like a word consists of letters the Bissantz sparklines consist of SparkFont characters (e. g. bars or line segments). The concatenation of formatted characters results in a “textual image” of the sparkline. Bissantz & Company now provides a new line font with unparalleled precision and clarity. It displays sparklines on-screen with high quality even with low resolutions. This font permits you to design information-dense reports and dashboards. Print-outs of sparklines are excellent.

Feature list

• Supports various sparkline types: bars, lines, winner/loser (whiskers), pies
  
• Creates sparklines directly in your Excel, Word, and PowerPoint documents
  
• Generates sparklines either textually using TrueType Fonts or as vector-based images (Enhanced Metafile Format)
  
• User-defined functions for dynamic sparkline updates in Excel XP, 2003 and 2007
  
• Flexible scaling of sparklines
  
• Additional statistical information: standard deviation, trend
  
• Multiple formatting options, like color and landmark values
  New: now also available in sparkline functions
  
• Allows for high quality print-outs
  
• Exports to popular bitmap image file formats: BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF
  
• Supports Microsoft Office 2000, Office XP, Office 2003 and Office 2007

Sparklines (mini-graphs in Excel cells)

Bissantz SparkMaker enhances all Excel dashboards and reports with information-dense mini-graphs Click Here