Spotfire-- freedom to "play" with data and visualizations
October 27, 2017
Spotfire-- freedom to "play" with data and visualizations
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Desktop
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire
Spotfire is currently only used by my department. We are using the software to bring in data from all of our assets, sort through the data, and create summaries about machinery running conditions. With the ability to compare parameters between similar pieces of equipment, my department can assess equipment health and drive future capital prioritization.
- Spotfire gives you the ability to toggle between different visualizations easily, which helps the user see the data in new ways.
- Spotfire is a great tool for bringing in huge amounts of data and summarizing it in an easy way. I particularly like the tool's ability to un-pivot tables, which makes it easier to bring in data from sources that would typically need to be re-formatted.
- Spotfire allows you to trellis visualizations, which is an easy way to report the same type of metric for several distinct groups. For example, it's easy to pull engine utilization by month for every station, and generate a large report which this information, within a few clicks.
- Sometimes the filtering schemes are confusing when moving from tab to tab within the program.
- It can be difficult to format everything to be presentable for the printable format. It's completely do-able to do this formatting, but it's not completely intuitive.
- I wish Spotfire had the ability to trellis data tables, so you could show the same information for different groups.
- Microsoft Excel
Spotfire makes it easy to bring in huge complex data sets and to "play" with visualizations to look at data in different ways. Excel allows you to perform basic data analysis, but does not make it as easy to look at visualizations, filter, trellis, etc.
- In-person training
- Self-taught
Someone else had to show me the basics of how to bring information and set up the data, but once I understood how to do this, most of my learning was on my own trying to click through the program. This worked well for me, Spotfire makes it easy to "play" with visualizations, filters, etc. and once you know that anything you do in the program won't change the underlying data, it gives you a lot of freedom to learn by trying. I would absolutely recommend this to others (after getting help with the basic data import).