Last month I introduced the concept of
sparklines and gave some examples of how they might be employed to
display data inline to better relate the visual display of
information within the context of the discussion involving said
information. In Part 2 of this article I’ll share some tools for
implementing sparklines in Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and
Corel WordPerfect (I’m going on faith with this code since I do not
have access to a copy of Corel WordPerfect). I’ll conclude with some
resources to find sparkline implementation in some common languages
such as PHP, Python and Ruby.
Sparklines in Microsoft Word and
Microsoft Excel
For creating sparklines in Microsoft Word and
in Microsoft Excel, I’ve found that the free Office add-on from the
German company Bissantz works best unless you are comfortable
writing Word and Excel macros. This add-on is called Sparkmaker and
is free to download and install for use for personal non-commercial
purposes. Once installed with will show up as the following icon on
Microsoft Word:
You can download SparkMaker by pointing your
web browser at
http://www.bissantz.de/sparklines/ and scrolling down to the
section titled “SparkMaker” and clicking on the link for Bissantz
SparkMaker 2.0 under the subsection “Download Area.” Before you
install SparkMaker 2.0, be sure to exit any open instances of Office
applications. Since SparkMaker utilizes portions of the .NET
framework with Office, you may need to update your .NET framework
and restart your computer before it will work properly.
To use SparkMaker in Word, simply click on the
button on the toolbar in the picture above once you are to the point
in the Word document where you want to insert your sparkline:
Once you’ve entered the values you’re wanting
to display as a sparkline, you can elect to either generate the
spark as text (if you download the SparkFonts free package from the
Bissantz website) or you can save the spark as a bitmap image (my
choice) and then insert the spark or insert the image you generated
into your Word document:
Sparklines in Corel WordPerfect
According to the Help File that installs along
with the program, Bissantz’s SparkMaker software will work with any
program that can handle Rich Text Format (RTF) files. Since Corel
WordPerfect offers RTF as a format, I am assuming that SparkMaker
will work with WordPerfect. Since I don’t have access to a copy of
WordPerfect I cannot be certain about whether it works or not.
Other Platforms
If you’re looking to implement sparklines in a
language or on a platform not listed here, never fear! If your
language or platform has an active coder base and is somewhat geared
toward research, statistics and/or data mining, some has probably
written a sparklines package or library or code snippet for your
platform. Here are a handful I know of:
PHP:
Project SparkLine from SourceForge.net;
Python: Bitworking
article on drawing sparklines with the Python Imaging Library;
Ruby on Rails:
Weed (MIT open source, does not require Rmagick) and Geoff
Grosenbach’s
Rails sparklines library (requires Rmagick).
Until next month, happy computing!
Links:
