When you think you are good at data visualization, there is much more coming ahead
June 28, 2018
When you think you are good at data visualization, there is much more coming ahead
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Spotfire Platform
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire
The main case for using Spotfire is to publish reports across the organization.I sometimes use it to create visualizations for presentations, as to provide a more dynamic way of presenting a case, being able to drill down the data to answer questions on the fly.
- Harmonization of concepts: often it is the case that more than one department needs similar kinds of reports, but produce them independently in Excel, access, through sql queries, etc.
- As a result, the management has trouble reconciling the values presented by the departments.
- Analysts are pressed to explain the differences and spend hours from trying to understand and reproduce the steps each department has taken to arrive at the discussed value, just to learn their selected data, categorization of variables and data treatment was different based on each department specific needs.
- With Spotfire, one department can become responsible to produce the analysis, while adjusting some visualizations to suit the second department specifications. As a result, less work and more transparence on the concepts used by each part of the organization.
- Easy access to data: instead of Excel spreadsheets or even some more sophisticated sql treated analysis which are made into PDFs and sent by email, the analysis access through browser is more stable.
- Interactive data analysis: its often the case that you show an indicator and someone asks, what are the contracts behind that total? How much of this is due to interest income, etc. With the drill down capabilities and sub analysis these questions are easily answered.
- The difference sum is sometimes painful, because it does not set consider an initial 0 value.
- For example, using the difference sum to de-accumulate a running sum observations for the year, will set January as 0 and the first significant value only in January. There should be an easy option to just define a difference sum between the months introducing an initial 0 observation so that the first January of the series also appear correctly.
- The so called "Sankey Diagrams" are also not so simple to implement
I have not really used it so much...my impression was that Spotfire has a better processing engine for large data, while Tableau delivers a more beautiful display of data.
- Online training
- Self-taught
Im quite used to managed structured data, so discovering spotfire was like finding a way to express myself.
But I would have had an easier time if I found some basic interpretations of data into Balance Sheets and PnL formats.
But I would have had an easier time if I found some basic interpretations of data into Balance Sheets and PnL formats.
No integration so far. We only use R and SQL databases. with it.