Item: Spotfire
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am currently using Spotfire to analyze incident data within my organization. It helps to bring data analysis to management in a clear visual way that tells a story of how the organization is performing by being able to merge data from multiple sources into one file using common fields to form the relationship.

Pros and Cons

Spotfire is great at letting you see the changes within the visualizations as you make them giving you the opportunity to be sure you are creating exactly what you want to see.
Having the ability to allow users to view your visualizations over an internet connection and still modify their view without actually making changes to the file is a great option.
The ability to use links to bring multiple data sources together helps to provide data that is useful to the end user.

There is a function limitation that does not allow you to create table visualizations/details on demand if your data is in a cube format.
Property controls are a great feature but creating a control that will limit the data is not always intuitive so you have to be very familiar with how to create the property controls and assign them.
It would be nice to have a little more control over how table/cross-table/summary tables are created, such as being able to create a table that has the same look and feel as if it were created in say Excel with the functionality of Spotfire.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Access

Training Types Used

Online training
In-person training
Self-taught

In-Person Training

The in-person training was great. We were able to see how the software is designed to work as well as providing lots of hands on demos and hands-on exercises to allow for practicing in order to become more familiar with how to achieve the results we were looking for when creating visualizations.

Online Training

The online training was very detailed and provided demos as well and hands on exercises, the downside to only taking the online training is that you are basically learning it on your own because you don't have that live interaction to help you when you get stuck or a concept is not clear.

Ease of Spotfire Training

It was easy to learn the basics of the software without training but it limits the ability to create the ideal visualization if you don't know what functions are available or if you don't know how to merge or limit data it keeps you from creating an analysis that is truly useful.

Likelihood to Recommend

I recommend Spotfire frequently to coworkers as it provides a lot of options for viewing data in a way that really allow you to make an analysis when the data is straight forward. I don't think it works as well when you have customers that are requesting a specific view that is not a part of the standard Spotfire package.

Using Spotfire to create analysis on the spot

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire