If you develop dashboards in Excel, a new company name BonaVista Systems has just made your life easier. They have just released an add-in for Excel, named MicroCharts, which makes it simple to create bullet graphs (my alternative to gauges and meters) and sparklines (Edward Tufte’s small, bare-bones time-series graphs). BonaVista Systems first came to my attention when Andreas Flockermann, one of its founders, submitted the winning entry for the dashboard design scenario of the 2006 Data Visualization Competition, which I’ll feature in a November article. At the time, I had no idea how he created such nice sparklines and bullet graphs, but now I do. Here’s a snippet from the winning dashboard to illustrate what MicroCharts can enable Excel to do:

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You might want to check this out.

Take care,