Data Driven 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).

And this update

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?)

I thought the “but least revenue generating” comment was odd. Check out some examples on kottke.org, like this one