Sparkline Chart

The Sparkline Chart was introduced by Edward Tufte as a small graph that is nonetheless capable of displaying a large amount of data. The main feature of this chart type is its tiny size, causing (or being made possible by) the absence of axes or any notes, which makes it impossible for viewers to see precise values. However, sparkline charts are great at showing the big picture.

There are four types of sparklines:

Line Sparklines. It is the simplest and most common type of the sparkline chart, which consists of points connected by line segments.

Area Sparklines. Basically, it is the Line Sparkline graph with the area between the series and the X-axis filled with color.

Column Sparklines. Each point in this type of visualization is depicted as a vertical rectangle, the height of which equals to its corresponding data value.

Win/Loss Sparklines. It is a variation of the Column Sparkline chart, in which points are also drawn as vertical rectangles, the height of which is determined by the corresponding data point's value. However, each data point may have only one of the three available values in this type of graph: positive, negative, or zero. As a result, any win/loss sparkline chart is visually divided in half, with the upper part featuring columns with positive values and the lower one containing those with negative values.