Sparkify™

Sparklines for Coda Made Simple

Bill French

Release Notes

Documentation

I’ve always admired smart data visualizations and especially the designed inspired by the world-renowned author

Edward Tufte⁠

in his works such as

Envisioning Information⁠

. If well-designed charts are the language of information understanding, Sparklines are the symbolic equivalent of

Blink⁠

- those snap judgments we often make that can be just as good as—or even better than—the decisions that we make when we analyze a situation carefully.

Make Sparklines Easy

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Get Sparkify™

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Sparklines are simply condensed data visualizations intended to leverage the internal “Blink” skills of your Coda users. They provide an extremely simple conveyance of data - perhaps a trend line or even a distribution over time - you get a sense of the underlying data in an instant. The digital world we live in doesn’t often afford the time to read complex charts; we need tools that embrace our capacity to blink and make rapid decisions.

The

Sparkify™ Pack⁠

make sparklines possible anywhere in your Coda documents with little technical effort.

Not surprisingly, I have been tracking my confidence level concerning the development and productization of Sparkify itself in a

Coda table⁠

. The table is really simple; just some notes and observations as I wend my way through the various aspects of the R&D process while trying to determine if Sparkify is worthy of publishing. Typically, Sparkify will be applied to the rows of a column or the detail records of a lookup table like this:

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But sparklines are formulas that also work inline in text as simplified KPIs (see examples below).

These two sparklines present the confidence (or happiness) I’ve enjoyed with specific product requirements. The Confidence Journey shows the relative success achieving certain technical milestones, while the Confidence Level simply aggregates those items to provide an overall metric. As a reader, you don’t really need a comprehensive or detailed chart to glean my assessment of the R&D experience; a sparkline is ideal for this.