Twitter Sparkline Generator!
The app that everyone’s been waiting for. After months (20 minutes) of coding and Q&A, Data Driven is proud to release Sparkbars! In Twitter! v2.0 You may need to right click and save as an xls to stop the .zip being added. As Twitter now accepts Unicode, we can use the block elements to create a sparkline in our posts (a sparkbar, I suppose would be the right name).
Open the Excel workbook (2003 and 2007), paste up to 140 values in column A, copy the resulting code out to Twitter, remove the extra return marks (?). Try not to be too annoying.
All amusement aside, this is kind of what Tufte originally thought of sparklines to be – a word-size graphic in the middle of a sentence – perhaps even more important when you’re restricted to 140 characters. Enjoy, you crazy tweeters..
April 2011 note: This post remains the most popular on my blog (but least revenue generating…) and the workbook was recently used by the Wall Street Journal for a tweet. I’ve updated the workbook so that the file works in Excel 2003 through 2010, and that the bars can have a non-zero baseline, which is great for closely spaced data. However this does violate design principles of bar charts not having a non-zero axis, so use with care (maybe it’s okay for sparkbars?)
Alex Kerin
V1.1 is already out, with the ability to add a space between bars!!!
Alex Kerin
And as if it couldn’t get any better, now with win/loss charts
Alex Kerin
Oh man, does it get better – it EVEN works on Facebook. Now you can annoy your friends as well as random people on Twitter.
Bryn_officeteam
Interesting use of Microsoft Excel! I am sure many Excel and Twitter users will find this amusing!
You should share this with the community of Excel users over on Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/microsoftexcel
Thanks,
Bryn
MSFT Office Outreach Team
John Munoz
I don’t know about you, but I have only 24 hrs in my day. Where did you find 30?
Once again, nice work Alex.
Alex Kerin
No TV, rainy, you know the rest.
Alex Kerin
Picked up nicely on Twitter – lots of retweets. My fav: Wow… @AlexKerin made sparklines for Twitter. ex: ▁ ▁ ▁ ▃ ▁ ▁ ▄ ▂ █ F-ing brilliant lo-fi info viz.
Alex Kerin
And a tweeter who actually used it to produce a real chart, rather than just playing with it:
Fresh data on world primary energy use by %: Oil 34.77, Coal 29.36, NG 23.76 Nuke 5.47, Hydro 6.63 | spark: █▇▅▁▂ @pkedrosky @alexkerin
Atul
This is great stuff!
Do you have an Excel version for Excel 2003? Thanks, again.
Alex Kerin
I don’t because 2003 can’t concatenate more than 32 values. I could do multiple concatenates – let me post a version
Alex Kerin
Version linked in the main text now works in 2003 as well….
Jon
I am impressed. I don’t know exactly why I would need this on Facebook, but I will think of reasons to use it.
Effective Use of Sparklines in Blog Posts « Data Driven
[...] a pie chart with 50 segments, doesn’t mean that we should. I recently posted a workbook to create sparklines in Twitter – they are created using text characters so the result is not overly attractive and has low [...]
Dave Kaufman - Techlife
Not sure if you check your Twitter account, but I had a question on how to use this tool. Would you rather I ask here?
Alex Kerin
Dave, ask away, I must have missed your tweet. Apologies.
Alex Kerin
Ok, I have a solution: Now posted in the main article
Uncheck box 5 to get a non-zero axis.
I had to change the way that resolution is calculated then update the vlookup to have another if statement.
Dave Kaufman - Techlife
First thank you. Second your comment “5. Bars start at zero (checked for yes, non-zero axis is against design principles, but may be ok for sparkbars)”
I found that interesting – most sparklines I have seen don’t start at zero. Say like stock prices or the like. I understand a sparkbar is a bar chart not a line chart but in reality the 0-8 icons could be pixel dots forming a line chart (if the ANSI characters worked.)
I think of this example: °.¸¸.•´¯`
Alex Kerin
True, I have an aversion for bar charts with non-zero axis, but I do think it’s fine in this case, especially if you put the range immediately after or before the chart.
Spock
Very interesting! Line charts coming soon?
Alex Kerin
There’s a chance you could do something very rough with text characters, but it would be great to be able to use an inline google chart…
John Coffey
Ditto for Google Spreadsheet / Chart version.
Great work!
Chris Pudney
Works in Open Office too
And hey presto!