In 1762
Laurence Sterne used typographical devices in his sixth volume of
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to illustrate his narrative proceeding: "These were the four lines I moved through my first, second, third, and fourth volumes,–". The 1888 monograph describing the 1883 eruption of
Krakatoa shows barometric signatures of the event obtained at various stations around the world in the same fashion, but in separate plates (VII & VIII), not within the text.
Edward Tufte documented a compact style in 1983 called "intense continuous time-series". He introduced the term
sparkline in 2006 for "small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images", which are "data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics". Later in 2020, Tufte attributed the idea to
Donald Knuth's "METAFONTbook". The first software sparkline was programmed in 1999 by
Peter Zelchenko. TD Ameritrade later discontinued QuoteTracker. On May 7, 2008, Microsoft employees filed a patent application for the implementation of sparklines in
Microsoft Excel 2010. The application was published on November 12, 2009, prompting Tufte to express concerns about patent breadth and non-novelty. On 23 January, 2009, MultiRacio Ltd. published an
OpenOffice.org Calc extension named "EuroOffice Sparkline". On March 3, 2022, Tomaž Vajngerl implemented sparklines in
LibreOffice Calc version 7.4, including support for importing sparklines from the
OOXML Workbook format. == Usage ==