Spotfire Data Science

It's well suited for companies who are working long-distance and who have lots of data to organize and present. My company does extensive field work collecting thousands of data points at a time, in many cases, so this is an excellent way to share data collected in the field with those still in the office so that reports can begin before our travels are really finished. It makes the office much more productive! Spotfire Data Science is less suited for companies with older employees or companies that are generally in one office and not doing distance work. It can be a little tricky for older people to grasp the interface and really utilize the program to its full potential so of course spending more time learning the software than using it effectively isn't a great use of time or money.

Incentivized

• The interface is screen based and much easier for teams of non-experts to use. Can, however, directly utilize in scripts and/or programming languages, so best of both worlds.
• Has an extensive range of statistical methods, as well as extensive statistics around those methods.
• The interface consistent across all modules.

Incentivized

• Although the graphics can be copied into Word or Excel, the copying and pasting process is buggy. Sometimes I basically have to do a Capture Rectangle of a graphic and paste it as a jpg, rather than having an embedded and editable graphic in my Word document.
• The dialog boxes for some of the common tests, like multiple regression and ANOVA, use quirky terminology that is not intuitive to new users coming out of grad school with a more updated education. I have been using it for over ten years, and the dialogs have not updated in all of that time.
• The tests like NMDS and PCA are clunky and difficult to use and get the appropriate outputs, especially compared to specialized software like PRIMER.

Incentivized

The company is hesitant to spend this much on software. They are primarily an engineering firm, and they don't understand the use of analytical software for environmental professionals.

Incentivized

I prefer Spotfire Data Science's approach. It is more natural and fits the way I think. I prefer to use Spotfire Data Science's VB for writing macros. It is real code, meaning that I do not need to trick the software to do what I need and there are no implied loops over solving simple problems. The graphs are publication quality and can be edited by hand or using a macro if I am building hundreds of them. Spotfire Data Science had a user-friendly approach to building lengthy data processing streams (in its workspaces). It is just so fast for analyzing a dataset that you have never seen before and efficient for ongoing work on the same data.

• Our company has had the program for less than 1 year. We don't expected a positive return this year. The goal is for Data Science to led to defined projects by the end of the end of the year and implementation in the following two. Overall, we are planning on 4 years to fully recoup the cost of the software and the cost of implementing identified projects.

Incentivized