Microsoft patent claim for “sparklines in the grid”

Microsoft has filed a patent claim for “sparklines in the grid.”

The Microsoft filing, made by

• Radakovitz, Samuel Chow (Redmond, WA, US)
• Buerman, Adam Michael (Bellevue, WA, US)
• Garg, Anupam (Redmond, WA, US)
• Androski, Matthew John (Bellevue, WA, US)
• Becker, Matthew Kevin (Kirkland, WA, US)
• Ruble, Brian S. (Bellevue, WA, US)

can be found here.

Microsoft’s patent claims deal with putting sparklines in spreadsheets (and, more generally, grids), which many have already done, and which I have suggested for years. Indeed, Beautiful Evidence (page 62) shows sparklines in grid boxes and even explains how to design those boxes! The claims way over-reach and seek to control and to own the use of sparklines in spreadsheets. My spirit in making sparklines was to make something helpful for intense data analysis and give it away to the world. Repayment results from my joy in seeing the use of my open source invention. What Microsoft’s patent claims demonstrate is the ridiculous state of the US patent system and of those who seek to exploit that system.

The Microsoft claims appear to go far beyond spreadsheets. The title of their patent submission is “Sparklines in the grid.” Note the title is not “Sparklines in Excel.” Every data table has a grid, sometimes invisible, sometimes with little ordered boxes. Nearly all typography has an underlying grid, so even a sparkline placed in a sentence might qualify as a “sparkline in a grid.” And, of course, every spreadsheet has a grid. The claims involve software code that constructs and possibly drives those sparklines in the grid. All sparklines are produced by software code, one way or another. Although masked by the language of patent legalese, the claims, when taken at their word, appear extremely broad.

Finally, there are many open source programs that produce sparklines into a spreadsheet. These computer programs have been reported at my forum here for years (beginning in 2003).

About 20 different programs, including code, are listed in the link above. Also my students at Yale hacked Excel to produce sparklines, probably around 1996-1998.

Further discussion is found at many other forums. Nearly all the discussants in those forums have ignored the link immediately above, which reveals many prior computer programs that already seem to do what is now claimed by Microsoft.

Peter Norvig of Google reports that sparklines have been in the Google Charts API since 2007.

Further copyright claims have also been spotted in Microsoft’s advertising for Excel 2000, as noted by Charlie Park.