Sparklines U.S. stock market activity (February 7,2006) Index Day Value Change Dow Jones 10765.45 −32.82 (−0.30%) S&P 500 1256.92 −8.10 (−0.64%) Nasdaq 2244.83 −13.97 (−0.62%)

Sparklines used inline are typically about the same height as the text around them.

A sparkline is a type of information graphic characterized by its small size and high data density. Sparklines present trends and variations associated with some measurement, such as average temperature

Temperature

Temperature is a physical property of matter that quantitatively expresses the common notions of hot and cold. Objects of low temperature are cold, while various degrees of higher temperatures are referred to as warm or hot...

 or stock market

Stock market

A stock market or equity market is a public entity for the trading of company stock and derivatives at an agreed price; these are securities listed on a stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.The size of the world stock market was estimated at about $36.6 trillion...

 activity, in a simple and condensed way. Several sparklines are often used together as elements of a small multiple

Small multiple

Small multiples are a series of small similar pictures, making a point through repetition...

.

The term sparkline was proposed by Edward Tufte

Edward Tufte

Edward Rolf Tufte is an American statistician and professor emeritus of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale University. He is noted for his writings on information design and as a pioneer in the field of data visualization....

 for "small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images". Tufte describes sparklines as "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics". Whereas the typical chart

Chart

A chart is a graphical representation of data, in which "the data is represented by symbols, such as bars in a bar chart, lines in a line chart, or slices in a pie chart"...

 is designed to show as much data as possible, and is set off from the flow of text (as in the following diagram), sparklines are intended to be succinct, memorable, and located where they are discussed.

Microsoft patent application

On May 7, 2008, Microsoft employees filed a patent application for the implementation of sparklines in Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...

2010. The application was published on November 12, 2009, prompting Edward Tufte, the acknowledged inventor of the graphic, to express concern.

Use in software

There are several libraries that support sparklines, among them Sparkline PHP Graphing Library and JFreeChart
.