Satisfied with Spotfire
Updated July 10, 2017
Satisfied with Spotfire
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire
At Tapstone, Spotfire is primarily used to quickly visualize and amalgamate data used by other programs or from Excel documents that is stored in bulky table formats that are not optimally useful in their raw state. Spotfire aids in our ability to quickly summarize data into useful information, and point us in the direction of a useful drill down.
Pros
- Spotfire's marking capibilities on line charts make it very easy to identify associated points on cluttered line graphs.
- Spotfire's filtering makes it very easy to boil analyses down to specific subsets of data, and then build them back up to whole again.
- Spotfire has the capability to link to many different data sources, making it relatively easy to keep an analysis up to date by linking to a live data source.
Cons
- As an Excel user, it is an odd transition to shift from thinking in terms of cells to thinking in terms of tables and columns. Some things that would be intuitively easy with Excel (adding 4 random cells from a document by clicking on each of the 4 cells) become much more complicated when you have to think in terms rows and tables only.
- When linking multiple live data sources together, then adding calculated columns to those data sources, then moving columns from one data table to another in one project, Spotfire can take a long time to open a project. It is also relatively easy to end up with a document that does not calculate the intended results in the most efficient way, and methods to troubleshoot inefficiencies are not always immediately obvious.
- Scatter plot line formatting could be more customizable. By default, Spotfire wants to use the same line type for each series in a scatter plot, and it is not easy for this user to figure out if there is a way to change line types per series on a chart.
- Excel
Many of the analysis that I do in Spotfire could also be done in Excel. Each of these programs have areas where they are especially useful. Specifically, the experience of building and customizing graphs from raw (not pivoted) data is much more pleasant in Spotfire than it is Excel. Once the data has been successfully loaded into Spotfire, it will also render graphs very quickly and handle extremely large amounts of data without slowing down the computer too much.
Using TIBCO Spotfire
Using TIBCO Spotfire
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- Plotting raw data meaningfully
- Coloring graphs by category
- Drilling down to next level of analysis
- Managing multiple data sources
- Performing calculations on plotted data
- Graphing from multiple data sources
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