Sparklines and dashboards are perfect together because they both embrace the “more information in less space” approach. In the past, we’ve featured the use of sparklines on some very innovative business intelligence interfaces, including this award-winning dashboard. Thankfully, we are seeing more business intelligence reporting and charting products offer sparklines as a graphing option.

For those who don’t have an easy way to generate sparklines for your dashboards, let’s take a look at the wonderful work by Joe Gregorio with his online sparkline generator.

As you can see from this series of screenshots, the Sparkline Generator Web Application and web service can come in very handy for your dashboard work. The application creates a publicly available URL to your sparkline. Alternatively, you can just pass in parameters to the URL. What a great contribution to Web 2.0. It’s been available for years, but we in the business intelligence dashboard community should all try and raise its profile.

Here is a screencap of the sparkline generator. Be sure to click the more button to see the generated sparklines and also a sample of how to put the data values into a title attribute.

Here is a look at some generated sparklines and their corresponding URLs. Note the parameters in the query string.

And here is a great idea on sparkline usage. Using the tool-tip, hover-over, alt attribute technique makes great use of the space you have on your dashboard.

Tag: Sparkline generator, Dashboard Sparklines, Dashboard Graphs