Sparklines in Businessweek!
The last Businessweek magazine of 2007 had a great display of sparklines, shown above. At a quick glance, they may not appear to be a quintessential replica of Tufte’s version. These sparklines take up a little more real estate, use colors to differentiate increases and decreases, and use a thicker line, just to name a few.
I like the fact that the illustrators use a different color for positive vs. negative percent change in investments. I also like that the value is listed in 1995 and 2007. I am a huge fan of sparklines and find it encouraging that others think they are valuable. The advantage of using sparklines instead of a table here is that you can quickly see where the significant increases or decreases were over the 12 years.
What would have been nice to see is the sectors sorted by the 2007 percentage instead of alphabetical by sector name. This way, a reader could quickly see which sectors currently make up the largest percent of venture capital investments.
Probably because I am a true analyst at heart, I quickly found that the percentages don’t add up to 100% in 1995 or 2007. Actually the totals are 76.9% and 89.2% respectively. What makes up the other 23-11 percent? Your guess is as good as mine. I may have listed a line for OTHER to denote the remaining percent not shown.
Kudos to the crew at BW for taking it up a notch!
If you’re interested in adding sparklines to Excel, check this website out. I found BonaVista’s MicroCharts to be the best for sparklines, bullet graphs and other micro chart types. They offer a 30-day free trial to check out the product.
Note: the layout above is a two-column table. However, if you look at the print copy, all of the lines are in one column.
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