Extension Watch: EuroOffice Sparklines

Productivity Sauce

The EuroOffice Sparklines extension for OpenOffice.org is a bit of a one-trick pony, but the trick it does is a rather clever one. It allows you to turn data in a Calc spreadsheet into a sparklines graph. Sparklines are "intense, simple, word-sized graphics" (Sparklines: theory and practice, Edward Tufte). According to Wikipedia, sparklines allow you to "present trends and variations associated with some measurement, such as average temperature or stock market activity, in a simple and condensed way."

Once installed, the EuroOffice Sparklines extension lets you instantly turn a row of data in a spreadsheet into a sparklines graph using the Insert -> EuroOffice Sparklines command. The extension also allows you to specify markers for the start and end of the graph as well as its highest or lowest points. Since sparklines graphs created by the extensions are just plain graphics objects, you can easily copy and paste them into any other OpenOffice.org document.