Item: Spotfire
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

There are a few groups that use Spotfire throughout our company. My particular group - Supply Chain - uses it for things like spend, contracting, and well count data. It helps us to look at a variety of different data points quickly, and to narrow down into specific categories and groupings much more easily than if we pulled the information from the raw data source.

Pros and Cons

Visualizations: clear, user-friendly, multiple options.
Web player: great to share information across company, especially with those that don't use the desktop version.
Layout: lots of options, you can personalize the page to look however you need it to.

Bookmarks: it can be difficult to use bookmarks, and sometimes hard to keep track of which ones I have worked and which I haven't (even though it gives me a time update).
Formatting between a desktop screen and a laptop screen: the view always is more condensed on our laptops, and I'm not really sure why - it would be great if it looked the same!

Alternatives Considered

I've never used another product for dashboard creation. I extensively use Microsoft Excel, but there are many times when Excel cannot handle the number of data points that I have, which is when I normally turn to Spotfire.

Training Types Used

Online training
In-person training
Self-taught

In-Person Training

The training was supposed to be more general user tips and tricks, but became very R focused very quickly. We haven't really been using R that much, and only a few of us actually know how to use it, so the training was over most of our heads, and not very applicable to our everyday work.

Online Training

It was helpful, and showed me a lot of different things that I could do with Spotfire. There were courses that focused on the basics to the advanced, and I was able to see how the variety of Spotfire options came together in order to make a dashboard. I would recommend these to anyone who is just starting out with Spotfire. Also, the Spotfire user boards are very helpful.

Ease of Spotfire Training

There were some parts that were very understandable without training, just clicking around and seeing what I could do with data points was very interesting. I was also lucky that there are some "super" users of Spotfire in my company that are more than willing to help answer any questions that I have about the product.

Likelihood to Recommend

Well suited when there is a lot of data or you want to show a variety of visualizations.
Not well suited with a little bit of data or if you don't have time to set up the visualizations how you want them to look. Sometimes if you have a lot of different data sources, it can also be confusing. Be sure that calculated columns are how you want them to be!

Spotfire in the Spotlight

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire