Microsoft patents sparklines in Excel

posted Fri 20 Nov 2009 by Michael Galloy under Visualization

Microsoft has patented sparklines in Excel and Edward Tufte is taking suggestions on what to do about it. The patent specifically mentions “sparklines in a grid”, evidently the patent is for sparklines attached to a cell not floating like standard charts in Excel (here is Microsoft’s blog post about the feature). I think this is a great capability for Excel, but I wonder how far-reaching this patent is?

Excel sparklines

UPDATE 09-28-2017: updated links to Microsoft post about sparklines.

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Microsoft patents sparklines in Excel