Teaching Graduage Visual Analytics and Visualization with Spotfire Cloud
June 29, 2021
Teaching Graduage Visual Analytics and Visualization with Spotfire Cloud
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
TIBCO Cloud Spotfire
Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire
I am a faculty member in the Business Intelligence and Analytics Department, Heider College of Business, at Creighton University. I learned about Spotfire years ago when it was at Stanford and followed it's progress since then. About 5-6 years ago, I incorporated it into my graduate Business Intelligence and Analytics Visual Analytics and Visualization course (about 100 students a year, all online). While we use Tableau for the majority of the course just because it is free and easy, we do use Spotfire for 20% of the course so the students can not only see a different system, but see the power of Spotfire and how easily one can get complex but easy to understand visualizations. In my opinion, Spotfire is best of breed. We use the Cloud version only because about 70% of the students have Macs, not PCs. Even though the Cloud has less functionality than the desktop version, I feel we can still experience a great deal of the features and visuals that Spotfire offers. I always get feedback from the students that they love the product, and are thrilled to have experiences in the course with it.
- Drill-down visual creation
- Brushing interaction
- Ease of use of the cloud version
- Cloud documentation
- Pricing for academia (ie. free) - students and faculty using it in a course
- Mac desktop version
- Some complex tutorials/demos
- We can only use it for the free trial period.
- I have to 'rebuild' the course sample files and accounts on Spotfire every semester.
- It is perfect as an excellent alternative to Tableau in the course.
- We have to use the less powerful Cloud version since the majority of the students have Macs. This means we can't use advanced AI features, for example.
We have not.
The only other tool we use in my course is Tableau. Tableau is very popular regionally (Omaha, NE), runs locally on Mac and PC, is free for students and faculty, and has a web outlet for sharing. It also plays well with AWS. For these reasons, we use it as the primary visualization tool in the course. As I mentioned earlier, we use Spotfire as an example of another tool that is popular and excellent. I have found that Spotfire is easier for them to use for many tasks, such as quickly building a visual, adjusting variables and data, and synchronizing charts.
Do you think Spotfire delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Spotfire's feature set?
No
Did Spotfire live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Spotfire go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Spotfire again?
Yes
Spotfire Feature Ratings
Spotfire Training
Course is still a success - but I would like to be able to use Spotfire more comprehensively than we do now.