A great summary of key requirements to build a data-driven culture, by Chris Stolte, Tableau co-founder:
1. Don’t fear the user,
2. Encourage corporate curiosity,
3. Manage to the outliers,
4. Measure, experiment and then measure again, and
5. Build trust and understanding.
I would add two more points, one of which Chris is too modest to state,
6. From my experience working at Netflix, no matter the level of decision-maker, ask them for the data to back up their decision and to examine the results of their decisions.
7. Deploy Tableau in your business- speed of insight is critical to the value of data in many business needs. Tableau quickly delivers beautiful insights that are understandable by all of your employees. There is no other application like it!
Read the article and see Chris’s comments first hand.
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We have several presentations and a book release in the the month of April!
We will be at the SAS Global Forum author party Monday afternoon, April 12th. “SAS for Dummies” is being released today, April 5th. I will be at the author party at the SGF conference with Chris Hemedinger (co-author) meeting other authors and SAS conference attendees.
On April 14th at 9 AM, at SAS Global Forum in Seattle, “The Future of Marketing Analytics with SAS Enterprise Guide“.
On April 14th, we are also
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SAS 9.2 is a big leap forward in many areas. One of them is a variety of new graph types and easy access to creation in SAS Enterprise Guide 4.2. I think these two charts offer a fascinating look at the 2008 Presidential Election Results using SAS Maps and Tile Charts from the upcoming book, “SAS for Dummies”, updated for SAS 9.2 and available for purchase this Spring!
One of my favorite new examples added to the 9.2 edition of the book shows the 2008 presidential election results in two views: a map of the US with the winner by % margin of victory and a tile chart showing the state size, the winner and their % margin of victory. Due to the black and white nature of the book, these are shown in grayscale in the book and here on the blog.
2008 Presidential Election Results on a Map, Winner by State with Margin of Victory
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Number 6
Waterfall chart examples with detailed instructions on creating them with your own data in Tableau
Waterfall Chart in Tableau and a Superior Alternative…
Number 5
Do your New Year’s resolutions have you wondering where your money goes? Here’s a snapshot of the average American and their spending habits
How the average American spends their income
Number 4
Trying to figure out how to share customer segmentation and lifetime value insights with your business team?
Customer Segmentation and Lifetime Value Analysis
Number 3
Where’s all that oil money going? Which countries are very dependent on oil imports? Which countries have so much oil their citizens will never need to work?
Visual Metrics to Inform: Petro-Wealth Importance by Region and Country
Number 2
A shocker at number 2 since this post is several years old, a testament to the popularity of SAS and the power of SAS Enterprise Guide,
The Joy of SAS Enterprise Guide
Number 1
And, the top blog post with props to Ellie Fields and Chris Stolte at Tableau for their strong editorial review and support, a 100 year dashboard of S&P stock returns and the historic investing environment S&P Composite Stock Market Returns Dashboard
Wishing all of you a happy, successful 2010! Thanks to our many customers and readers for all of your support! Finally, a special thanks to all of our friends at Tableau Software and SAS!
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Reviews of Stephen’s latest book, “Rapid Graphs with Tableau”
“A great work – this is going to be a much loved book.”
Marc Rueter- Director of Sales Consulting, Tableau Software
“A must read for anyone interested in Tableau. Clear explanations, practical advice and beautiful examples…”
Elissa Fink – Vice President of Marketing, Tableau Software
Back Cover Text
Tired of boring spreadsheets and data overload from confusing graphs? Master the art of rapid graphs with Tableau Software. Tableau is designed with one goal in mind – to give you the power to quickly explore and understand your data so that you can use your results in a wide variety of real-world situations. After learning Tableau, you will be able to clearly communicate your findings with audience-friendly graphs and tables.
“A picture is worth a thousand words” is a common saying that is more relevant today than ever as volumes of data multiply and the need for easy access to answers becomes more critical. From simple yet stunning graphs to vibrant multi-graph views capable of communicating incredible insights, this book will cover the extensive range of Tableau capabilities in easy-to-follow examples. Learn the scope and flexibility of this powerful application in just 8 days and go beyond the traditional limits of data presentation!
Please note, the cover image will take several days to appear on Amazon. The back cover image of the book is lower in this post.
Gain a working knowledge and broad overview of the most powerful analytic platform- SAS!
Jonathan Koomey’s masterpiece on thinking and working analytically- truly exceptional for anyone interested in analytics!
Stephen Few’s latest work- merging the world of visualization and analytics brilliantly!
Stephen Few’s book on dashboard design- principles for good design that will inform and delight your audience!
This was the first book I read by Stephen Few. This helped change my thinking on how people perceive and process information. Using these principles also helped me to significantly improve my presentations and ability to explain complex analytic results in simple, actionable tables and graphs.
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“A Week in the Life of an Analyst Rock Star: Using Analytics to Dramatically Boost Bottom Lines”
You can download the examples discussed here (Adobe PDF file). Once you have the examples downloaded, click here to listen to the recorded webcast (download as an MP3 file).
The case studies and topics discussed on this webcast include:
- How a niche winery analysed it’s customer segmentation using the Customer Lifetime Value metric and dramatically increased it’s marketing ROI
- An oil and gas reserves case study that demonstrates the emerging value and impact of using analytics and powerful metrics visualisation in journalism
- How analytics reveals strategies for maximising the uptake in a community of “green practices”
WITH: Stacey Barr and Stephen McDaniel, co-founder of Freakalytics, LLC and author of “Rapid Graphs With Tableau Software” and “SAS for Dummies”. Stacey is “The Performance Measure Specialist” from “Down-Under” and is a recognized expert at how simple improvements in performance measurement can radically improve your business. Stacey was delightful to work with and I encourage you to visit her website for advice on making measurements powerful, easy and fun!
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My Background in Data Warehousing
I have been involved in the creation, development, and maintenance of seven data warehouses through the years- one of them before I even knew about the term “data warehousing”! I have built them with SAS and Oracle, SAS alone, Informatica and Oracle, Oracle alone, and SQL Server.
I have also visited many companies as an adviser, consultant and user of their data warehouse. In these many visits, I have seen some successes and many failures. Often, the failures could have been prevented with some key guiding principles.
Data Warehousing or Enterprise Data Integration?
Data warehousing is now known by a new buzz word, Enterprise Data Integration. In fact, SAS recently renamed SAS ETL Studio as SAS Data Integration Studio (they also added some new features around the EDI area, one new feature was around continual data acquisition so that near real time data feeds are available in the data warehouse.) Another great part of SAS EDI is SAS Data Quality, this should be a consideration throughout the entire process, but I won’t directly comment about data quality in this post. Since most people still use the term data warehousing, so I will keep the popular terminology over the analysts and even SAS.
What Does it Take to Build a Successful Data Warehouse?
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Whether you are a grad student, business analyst, statistician, or even a long time user of SAS software- SAS for Dummies (available at Amazon) offers quick access to a vast survey of practical knowledge using the new and exciting world of SAS 9. If you are using the latest version of SAS Learning Edition (version 4.1), this book also makes a perfect companion since it covers SAS Enterprise Guide and the same release of SAS 9.
Like many Dummies books, it is an introduction that will get you moving forward and make you productive in short order. SAS products covered include SAS 9, SAS Enterprise Guide 4.1, SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office 2.1, SAS Web Report Studio 3.1, data warehousing with SAS, statistical analysis with SAS, forecasting with SAS, and data mining with SAS. After using this book, you may be inspired to read further on areas of greater importance to you (see my Other Books page for great reviews and recommendations.)
SAS for Dummies is very different from most SAS books since it does not focus on just one topic, such as data management, survival analysis, or SAS programming. Instead, I offer you key points and capabilities for a broad range of areas needed to access your data, manage your data, create reports and summaries, make awesome graphs, and get you started on the path of analytics guru!
Adobe Acrobat PDF excerpts of the book are available here (note that they each open in a new browser window):
SAS for Dummies Table of Contents
SAS for Dummies Sample Chapter
SAS for Dummies Index
SAS for Dummies Sample Datasets, also included with SAS Enterprise Guide. I have them available here in case you can’t locate or simply don’t have these sample datasets. You will need to place them in a folder and SAS library accessible to your SAS server or in a folder where you can import them to your SAS Server with Enterprise Guide.
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To all you long-time users of SAS out there, why are you continuing to write the arcane code required to make graphs with SAS programming? I remember the pain of scanning the nearly 1,000 pages of GRAPH manuals to locate just the right options to tweak my graphs for business presentations. Many days, I wanted to ditch it all and just fall back to Harvard Graphics for all of my graphs (yes, this was quite some time ago!) Consider using SAS Enterprise Guide and save yourself many sleepless nights and get the easy ability to export to Office seamlessly.
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A recent post on SAS-L asks about using EG in a group that has used SAS for quite some time. Here are my thoughts, if you have others feel free to post them as comments!
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SAS Enterprise Guide is hard to describe, difficult to pigeonhole, a very powerful tool that is the “Excel” of SAS, and the closest thing there is to an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for SAS. Since the release of SAS 9, Enterprise Guide is the new face of SAS for general purpose use in a variety of situations. Enterprise Guide is now included with desktop SAS for Windows, sold with almost every BI Server sale, bundled with many of the SAS Solutions, and loved by users at many companies I have visited. It does have shortcomings, but it is capable of a breadth of work that no other tool is capable of performing (at least that I have ever seen!) Simply stated, it leverages many of the old and new strengths of SAS in an easy to use desktop application.
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SAS is the 2nd largest BI vendor in the world, just behind Business Objects, according to this report posted at http://www.sas.com/news/analysts/idc_bi_0607.pdf
It’s interesting to note that Business Objects growth rate slowed by half this past year (down from 14% to 7% growth/year.) SAS’s rate accelerated (up from 13 to 17%) and Microsoft (up from 25 to 28%) are the few large vendors seeing acceleration in growth rates. It’s possible SAS could take the number one spot in the next year or two
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Question: from a reader in Sweden
Just saw on Amazon that this new book is available. I know the examples in it are from using Enterprise Guide 4.1, but I have the Learning edition 2.0 which includes Enterprise Guide 2.1. Can I still use the book, or are these versions of Enterprise Guide very different?
Answer: from Stephen
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SAS for Dummies is being used at Duke University Medical School as one of two texts for a course on Introduction to Statistical Methods. See http://crtp.mc.duke.edu/content.asp?page=courseinfo. The program the book is being used in is described as:
“… provides academic training in the quantitative and methodological principles of clinical research. Designed primarily for clinical fellows who are training for academic careers, the program offers formal courses in research design, research management, medical genomics, and statistical analysis.”
I have to say this is somewhat of a surprise at first
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This book is a well written and succinct introduction to SAS programming and basic statistical analysis. Using just PC SAS with BASE and STAT, you can pick up the basics of programming with SAS for data access, data manipulation with the DATA step and functions, basic SAS PROCs, controlling output appearance, leveraging MACRO capabilities of SAS, basic statistical analysis, and program debugging. With SAS Learning Edition and this book you can quickly master the basics of the SAS language.
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