Fun with SparkLines

If you have never heard of a sparkline, they are what Edward Tufte describes as “word sized graphics.” Said another way, they are little charts that you can use in the middle of a paragraph. Said yet another way, they are really cool.

Colin Ramsay, who runs Plastiscenic, and is a customer of ours, has created a really fun little application on our API. It displays a sparkline of revenue by month.

It’s a pretty compact way of seeing whether you are on track in your business or not. I’ll let Colin explain what it all means:

Ones in which invoice totals exceed the specified upper threshold are marked in green, and ones which are lower than the lower threshold are red. Everything else is black. To the side of the graph, there’s a numerical readout of the invoice totals from this month and the previous month, again coloured accordingly.

If you’re interested in using it for yourself, Colin has provided the source.