* Tickers for your site for not much effort
This week’s Gearhead discusses Sparklines, a powerful technique for communicating numeric information.
Invented by Edward Tufte, the guru of information display, Sparklines are (in Tufte’s words): “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.”
To summarize the concept: Sparklines are miniature graphs inserted in-line with text so that rather than distracting you from the narrative when you need to refer to regular graphs Sparkline graphs convey the sense of the data being within the narrative.
If that sounds rather rarified check out the “What are sparklines?” page of Bissantz & Company, publisher of SparkMaker, a product that’s discussed in the Gearhead column.
A related product also published by Bissantz that wasn’t covered in Gearhead is SparkTicker, a tool that reads data from Excel spreadsheets and generates sparklines as Windows desktop tickers or as HTML content for Web sites.
After installing under Windows 2003 or XP with Microsoft Excel 2000, XP, or 2003 with the .Net Framework version 1.1, you can create a SparkTicker by loading an Excel spreadsheet and clicking on the SparkTicker icon in the toolbar. In the SparkTicker pop-up dialog you enter the ticker’s name, select the Sparkline type (line, bars, winner-loser, deviation, comparing, or share of total), and the associated data ranges for that type.
You save each SparkTicker you create and when you close the pop-up dialog a new sheet is created in the workbook that contains the specification of all SparkTickers you defined. These definitions are read by the desktop ticker to create its display as well as used by the pop-up to generate the HTML ticker content.
The desktop ticker, a fairly slick standalone application, allows you to zoom into the generated sparkline by clicking on any point in any bar graph-style SparkTicker. The zoom feature dynamically rearranges the surrounding points and displays the selected and surrounding points’ associated values. You’ll have to try it to see how cool this display technique really is.
The Web output creates a less sophisticated display (there’s no zoom feature) but it is still a very effective presentation tool. The actual ticker is implemented using the marquee tag which, while not defined by W3C, is supported by all the major browsers. The actual Sparklines generated by the SparkTicker tool are combined into a single PNG image that is then scrolled using the marquee tag.
The simplicity of the SparkTicker output makes it quick and easy to incorporate in other Web content and the fact that the SparkTickers are generated anew each time you save them means that the Sparklines can be easily updated by updating the spreadsheet and then re-exporting the Web ticker.
This software is currently in beta (isn’t everything?) despite being a version 1 release. You can use it for free for non-commercial purposes only.SparkTicker is definitely a product worth looking at although, if you want to create more complex SparkTicker-type presentations, using the server-side CGI Sparkline generator discussed in the Gearhead column might be more effective. The benefit of SparkMaker (when it becomes a commercially useable version) will be for smaller organizations that want to generate Sparkline tickers without much effort.
