Data visualisation is definitely this year’s hot topic in BI: I’ve already blogged about how much I like Tableau (though they seem to be pretty much in bed with Hyperion now), and now here come Microcharts – another cool way of looking at your Analysis Services data:
Take a look at the online gallery:
To be honest I’d never heard of sparklines and so on before I saw an early beta of this stuff, but I’m definitely a convert now and with the focus on Microsoft BI now switching heavily to Excel with Office 2007 this is a timely release.
Hey Chris – Sparklines were developed and refined by Ed Tufte – see his new book Beautiful Evidence for a great read!
I just finished reading an enlightening book called "Information Dashboard Design: The effective Visual Communication of Data" by Stephen Few. He uses these exact same chart types / styles.
Sparklines are a great tool. Check out http://ewbi.blogs.com/develops/2005/07/sparklines.html for a C# implementation.
–jason