Dashboard designers, actually information visualization gurus in particular, love the use of sparklines, those little trendlines created by Edward Tufte.
But popular dashboarding packages have not caught up with the designer demand for sparkline graphing and so when dashboard practitioners experiment with the integration of specialty products such as MicroCharts into major offerrings such as Microsoft BSM (Business Scorecard Manager) and PPS (Performance Point Server), the community takes notice.
Several times now, different Dashboard Spy readers have pointed me to a post by Nick Barclay titled PPS/BSM Sparklines in Scorecards in which he shows the results of using the MicroCharts sparklines in both a Business Scorecard Manager display and a PerformancePoint Server 2007 dashboard.
Here’s a screengrab of the BSM Scorecard with the resulting sparklines:
Next we look at the PPS dashboard with sparklines:
Read Nick’s fine post for the details of what he learned in these two experiments.
By the way, if the name Nick Barclay sounds familiar to you, I’ve recommended his books to Dashboard Spy readers in the past. Take a look at the books listed below.
Tags: Sparklines in Microsoft BSM Scorecards, PerformancePoint Dashboards Sparkline
I guess my problem/question with sparklines (especially when several of them are presented side-by-side like this) is … what axis/scale is used? Are they all auto-scaled? Are all the sparklines scaled the same (so I can compare them)? Does the (invisible) axis start at zero? Are the data plotted to show %-change, or the actual values?
I guess (hopefully) in the context of a dashboard, the person viewing it would know the answers (maybe the details are provided in a “help” button, and this type of detail is suppressed in the actual dashboard to save space).
Anybody got some thoughts in this area?