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Sparklines

Devin Knight continues his custom visuals series with the sparkline:

Key Takeaways

  • Shows trends in data most often by time.

  • It can only visualize a single measure.

  • The Sparkline can be configured to animate across time.

In the right circumstances, I love sparklines.  My circumstances are as follows:  when you are viewing time series data for relatively few elements in which the trend is more important than the levels.  In that scenario, sparklines are efficient and tell the story without extraneous numbers or clutter getting in the way.