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Redesigning the Office 2010 Ribbon

Posted on 17 Dec 2009 at 12:19

Simon Jones examines the thinking behind the Ribbon's redesign in Office 2010, and the new features in Excel 2010

Microsoft has rightly publicised Excel 2010’s new Sparklines feature, whose breadth and depth of formatting options make them extremely flexible tools. These miniature “charts within a cell” were invented by Edward Tufte and explained in his book Beautiful Evidence, where he described them as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics”.

Putting these little graphs inline with the data gives context to the numbers, and can help people make sense of a mass of figures. Excel 2010 has three basic types of sparklines: Line, Bar and Win/Loss, which shows miniature blocks above or below a line to quickly convey whether the value is above or below some threshold.

Within these three basic types you get great flexibility over how to colour lines, points or blocks; how to show, colour or scale the axes and so on. Lines, for instance, can show all their data points, none of their data points, or just the highest, lowest or negative ones.

When using multiple sparklines you can have them all scale independently to better show differences between the values within each series, or you can set them to share the same scaling, which better shows the differences between different series.

Picking one or two sparklines to show your data is a great way to summarise multiple values into a tiny space, making trends or outlier values stand out more clearly than the figures can on their own.