Sparklines for Next-Generation Business Reporting, Analyses and Dashboards

Business reports and analyses on a single sheet of paper – all created with a few simple clicks in Microsoft® Excel: The new SparkMaker 3 empowers Microsoft Office users to condense their data into mini-graphs (sparklines).

Nuremberg (PRWEB) September 2, 2006 -- What have CFOs, accountants, controllers, production and service managers as well as government statisticians in common? They all demand easy-to-understand, information-dense reports or analyses ideally on a single sheet of paper. They increasingly use a new chart type for this: sparklines. SparkMaker 3 is the unique tool for Microsoft Office users to automatically generate these mini-diagrams as bar or line charts within Excel reports, Word documents or PowerPoint slides.

What is so special about "sparklines"? Imagine a sales report with data on revenues for several products, regions and sales representatives. It shows the current values for the last month ended. If you want to get a feeling for developments in sales you require charts for each value that depict the previous months (e.g. 24 months). A large number of slides or report pages results from this effort and comparisons among values are a hassle.

Now reduce each chart to the size of a word, remove all unnecessary legends and grids, and place the most current value for each chart right behind it. What you get is a report that depicts roughly 24 times the information you had available in the report without these mini-graphs and all on a single page. Instantly, every reader not only interprets a current snapshot of the revenues, but considers historic changes for each value (e.g. trends or cyclical ups-and-downs) and compares these. This is what you should expect from sparklines when dealing with figures.

A sparkline is no fancy concept for IT-specialists – every Microsoft Office user can generate sparklines with a few clicks and generate automatically updated sparklines in his or her Excel reports. The new Bissantz SparkMaker 3 is a simple add-on to Microsoft Office and provides all sparkline technology required for business purposes. Bissantz SparkMaker 3 offers bars, lines, whiskers (win/loss-indicators) and pie charts as sparkline variants. All of these can be used in dynamic Excel functions within Excel cells. They guarantee that data changes in the spreadsheet are automatically recognized and the sparklines are updated. SparkMaker also provides an intuitive user interface which allows users to create sparklines manually and insert them directly into Excel cells or even into Microsoft Word documents and PowerPoint slides. The sparklines created with SparkMaker 3 are also well-suited for display on web pages.

Dr. Nicolas Bissantz, CEO and founder of the German BI software vendor Bissantz & Company illustrates the benefits of sparklines: "Many of our customers confirm significant improvements to their information management. By using sparklines for their reporting they have reduced endless presentations of slides to focused and vivid discussions about a single piece of paper. We have brilliant examples from diverse industries such as banking and investment, logistics service providers, manufacturing as well as various government agencies who already leverage sparklines for their purposes."

Carrie Dolan, an Epidemiologist of the Virginia Department of Health explains in an internet expert forum on sparklines: "...we used the newly released version of Bissantz SparkMaker 3 which allows sparklines to be created with less resources and time, making implementation easier than ever before."

To let Office users experience these features live, Bissantz & Company offers a free trial-version of SparkMaker for download at http://www.bissantz.de/sparklines/sparkmaker.asp. Typical usage scenarios for SparkMaker include (but are not limited to) performance measurements for product families, regions, accounts, sales persons, stores, production facilities or customers. Furthermore, innovative news publishers enrich sports results (e.g. league standings over time) and stock quotes with sparklines while internet-based news providers display e.g. page views and similar measurements to their audience.

The sparkline concept has been invented by Edward Tufte (Professor Emeritus at Yale University, www.tufte.com), the renowned expert for information design. He states that at the heart of the concept are "intense, simple, word-sized graphics": A sparkline depicts data in miniaturized graphs and contributes context information to interpret indicators. Besides using sparklines to enhance traditional paper-based reports which are generated in Microsoft Office an increasing number of managers want to use electronic displays for consuming their information. Sparklines based on user-defined Excel functions are also perfectly suited for management reporting and analysis in such modern electronic management dashboards and cockpits.

Nuremberg, 2006-08-30

About Bissantz & Company GmbH
Bissantz & Company is a German Business Intelligence (BI) software vendor who specializes in software solutions for Analysis, Planning and Reporting. Patented visualization technology ensures that data patterns are recognized quickly and communicated clearly in reports and dashboards. Innovative sparkline technology is integrated in Bissantz’ full-fledged BI-suite DeltaMaster and in addition provided to Microsoft Office users as separate products.

Press Contact:

Bissantz & Company GmbH
Dr. Roland Zimmermann, Business Development
Nordring 98
90409 Nuremberg
Germany
Tel. +49 911 935536 0
Fax +49 911 935536 10
http://www.bissantz.com/en

SparkMaker download: http://www.bissantz.com/sparklines/sparkmaker.asp
Press material (screenshots and examples): http://www.bissantz.de/press/2006-08-30/

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