Slashdot

The patent is obviously bad. As the summary states, there is plenty of prior art. If you read the patent, it's also trivial - it's just making graphs smaller.

Will the USPTO reject it?
Maybe.

But even if they do, we also need to ask:
Will anyone at Microsoft be fined or imprisoned for applying for this bogus patent?
Unfortunately, not.

A comment on the blog post [harvard.edu] discussing the feature (to which TFS links) says:

They haven’t tried to patent sparklines, but the use of sparklines in Excel. I.e. the automatic updating of a sparkline embedded in a spreadsheet.

Cue the posts on how obvious and stupid the patent is regardless of this below. Point is, it's not an attempt on something already claimed by someone.

This is one of those issues I'd love to hear a real patent attorney weigh in on: If someone files a patent on something you can prove you demonstrated publicly at an earlier date, what are your options? Can you file an opposition to the patent? How does it work?

First, the actual claims are considerably narrower than just 'any and all uses of sparklines.' The broadest claim is about the use of sparklines in a dynamically updated electronic document. Most of the narrower claims have to do visual effects, the handling of null values in the spreadsheet, etc. This is pretty tame stuff.

Second, this is a newly filed application. The examiner will almost certainly come back with multiple rejections based on obviousness, and the claims will likely be narrowed in response. Like most negotiations, the parties start off with extreme positions and work towards compromise.

Third, the patent application already cites Tufte (along with a dozen other pieces of prior art) in the Information Disclosure Statement. In other words: Microsoft gave the patent examiner many important pieces of prior art. The examiner will no doubt find many more. This is all publicly available through the Patent Office's Patent Application Information Retrieval [uspto.gov] system.

Fourth, there is no need for Microsoft to acknowledge Tufte as an inventor on the patent application. Inventorship in the patent context is a legal term of art with a specific meaning. The fact that Microsoft said that Tufte invented sparklines is not the damning piece of evidence many are assuming it is (and recall from point three, above, that Microsoft acknowledged Tufte in its IDS). First, Tufte invented sparklines more than a year before the filing date, so any patentable claims must be a non-obvious improvement upon or use of sparklines, not sparklines themselves. Second, Tufte clearly did not work with the Microsoft inventors, so he cannot be a co-inventor of anything claimed in this application.

Once again non-experts hear hoofbeats and scream 'Zebra Stampede!' The comments on Tufte's site, for example, are a joke, an absolute mess of uninformed speculation. Given the wealth of publicly available information on patents and patent application, the Slashdot editors should do more to fact check these stories before publishing them.

Finally, I'll just tack on that if sparklines are so great and this is all so obvious, then surely there's an open source version that predates this application. Remember, though, that this application was filed on May 7, 2008, so the open source version would need to predate that, preferably (but not necessarily) by a year or more. That would actually be an important piece of prior art.

Over on the Microsoft Excel Team Blog [msdn.com] they even give Edward Tufte credit as the inventor of these sparklines.

For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics”, as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence. Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing:

Microsoft patented the use of sparklines as a visualization for a single cell in a grid. In the US patent system, that's night and day different. They recognise Edward Tufte on their website [msdn.com] for his invention of the sparkline: "For Excel 2010 we've implemented sparklines, "intense, simple, word-sized graphics", as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence."

If they would patent the sparkline they would have no claim because of broadly published prior art, under 35 U.S.C. 301: "Any person at any time may cite to the Office in writing prior art consisting of patents or printed publications which that person believes to have a bearing on the patentability of any claim of a particular patent. If the person explains in writing the pertinency and manner of applying such prior art to at least one claim of the patent, the citation of such prior art and the explanation thereof will become a part of the official file of the patent. At the written request of the person citing the prior art, his or her identity will be excluded from the patent file and kept confidential."

Speaking from an information visualisation perspective Microsoft badly implemented sparklines in excel.

I've used sparklines that were updated "automatically" from the values in a database. The software in question tracked the coffee consumption pr. person in the lab, and displayed it using sparklines on a web page (no longer online). The sparkline code was a PHP snippet I found on the net somewhere. There must be plenty of prior art.