What are sparklines?
Sparklines come from the Edward Tufte book Beautiful Evidence. It’s a great book and well worth checking out. (I was recommended his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information as an apprentice engineer and just loved it.)

Sparklines are little data words. A small line graph to give context and meaning to the information that follows.

You see them in a lot of places: here is an example from my Google analytics page    62.30% New Visits.
Lot more information than just 62.30% New Visits alone

Looks like Microsoft has filed a patent claim for sparklines in Excel. United States Patent Application 20090282325. NOW it is just an application but even so it is quite amazing. Of course The USPTO allows anyone to file an application for anything, as long as they pay the fee. It doesn’t give you any rights.

The good news is I now know that sparklines can be generated in Excel!