Highly visual proximity to the data for an advanced analyst
April 06, 2016
Highly visual proximity to the data for an advanced analyst
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire
Spotfire was used to provide transparency to our ERP data for marketing/sales support, purchasing, and inventory management.
- Spotfire provides a lot of proximity to the data. I can quickly throw up a dozen different visualizations to evaluate the data from multiple perspectives, with drill-down visualizations easily created and defined by data "markings" rules.
- My favorite is the on-demand link capability, which enables me to easily trawl through data sets (where I've pre-defined a connection.)
- Spotfire has excellent drill-down capability. Two clicks and you have set up a secondary visualization that explores a sub-set of the data from a different perspective.
- Spotfire has a system of markings that can define what data shows up in what visualization or circumstance. It is very handy to rapidly explore the "corners" of your data, if you will, to see the odd features or characteristics of the data.
- Flow of data. What I mean is, I end up with these large files with a dozen tabs where I'm splitting off a chunk of data, performing calculations in a cross-table, exporting and saving it as a .csv, re-importing it, doing more calculations, and then merging these results back into another data set. And then I'm only interested in a subset of this new data, but I'm opening up the entire massive report and adding a new tab to view it.
- Spotfire Enterprise Runtime for R. This isn't a "try-it-you'll-figure-it-out-as-you-go-along" application. At least, I never could.
- Getting questions answered. The community, availability of experts, and easily-googled reference questions. Getting "OVER" statements correct can be tricky. Understanding how to approach a particular situation within Spotfire can be uncertain. The paid training, I thought, was excellent -- but it was relatively expensive, and (at least a year ago, maybe it's gotten better, because this has been consistent feedback) it seemed there should have been far more training freebies.
- Spotfire is a nice all-in-one package (extraction, visualization, and heavier-hitting advanced capabilities) but we've hit a point where we want a dedicated ETL tool, and easier-to-use visualization tools for non-quant, non-analytics people. (But quantitative analysts like myself are the losers in this transition-- we really like our Spotfire!)
Tableau is pretty but very shallow. Alteryx is very nice, but doesn't have the proximity to the data through visual exploration. Alteryx is more like a drag'n'drop analogy to programming, where you are placing icons in a workflow instead of writing code lines in a program. So Alteryx doesn't have the immediate visual display, so I don't feel as close to the data (not as certain of what is happening in there.)