Practical tips for quickly building and maintaining these data insight tools Read the rest of this entry »
Tuesday, March 2, 2010- 2:00 PM Eastern Time / 11:00 AM Pacific Time
Webinar – Achieve Marketing Dashboard Nirvana
tableau public – share your visual insights with the world!
tableau public is now available! What’s not to love? Free web hosting of your visualization and a free desktop license of tableau public, based on the award-winning, rapid data visualization tools in Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server. With tableau public, you can learn the breadth of Tableau while sharing your insights with the world on any blog or web site.
Freakalytics is excited to be featured on the home page of tableau public, highlighting our stock market returns dashboard!
Click here to read the details about this dashboard, from our blog post last June.
Embedding tableau public content is simple and quick. Your web site visitors will need NO software installation, since Tableau depends on native Ajax functionality used by sites like GMail. Although not officially supported in the current release, tableau public is viewable and functions interactively on the iPhone based on our simple tests!
On your Tableau journey, consider…
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Presidential Election Results with SAS Maps and Tile Charts
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 Read the rest of this entry »
Your favorite Freakalytics blog posts of 2009!
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!
Add Your Comment HereTableau College Student Edition for Just $69-$99!
Learn the hottest visual analysis tool and impress your friends, your professors, your drinking buddies and even your family with incredible visual analytics from Tableau! From great data presentations to data exploration to dashboards that wow your class, get all the features of Tableau Professional edition for $69 for 6 months or $99 for 12 months.
Consider picking up a copy of our book on Tableau to master Tableau in short order, just $39 on Amazon. Browse the Table of Contents and the 1st overview chapter here.
All the best in your data adventures!
Stephen McDaniel
Spotlighting Example in Tableau
This workbook is an example of spotlighting in Tableau. Spotlighting involves applying user rules about data values to spot certain outcomes. With Tableau it is simple to apply basic to complex rules for spotlighting. This is beyond the standard highlighting capabilities available by placing measures on the color shelf.
As this example demonstrates, fairly complex rules can be used in Tableau to control spotlighting in simple calculated fields. Comments appear on the captions in each view (bottom of each view area in the Tableau workbook.)
Text Table Spotlighting
Bar Chart Spotlighting
This example was
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Tableau Training by Freakalytics, Orlando, FL, Jan 26-28, 2010
Announcing the availability of our first Tableau Training location in 2010- sunny, warm Orlando, FL! Topics include visual analysis for presentation, data exploration and dashboard design. Tableau Certification is also available. Read the details and find other upcoming locations in 2010 at http://www.Freakalytics.com/training.
Freakalytics also works with many leading organizations to present our highly-rated training on-site, see http://www.freakalytics.com/consulting. On-site training is a great value for teams of 5 or more people seeking to make the most of their investment in Tableau Software in short order!
Add Your Comment HereDid the super-smart (numerati) cause the near economic collapse?
This editorial highlights a fascinating yet simple theory, that super-smart people (the numerati) have created extremely complex and little understood financial instruments that helped drive us to the brink of economic ruin. These instruments originally had applications of merit that were reasonable. However, the profit potential was too large and the opportunity for application in almost any area of investing was simply too great a temptation. Over the past decade, derivatives have become the instrument of choice for a variety of hedge funds, investment firms and even once staid and conservative insurance companies.
AIG is an excellent example of where these instruments can take a company. To date, AIG has required “just” $183 billion in taxpayer bailouts to date. That’s $183,000,000,000.00 or greater than the combined endowments of the top 15 universities in the US (ranked by endowment as of 2008.) Wow, we could have endowed another 15 top universities in the US with just the losses created by AIG!
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Listen to the Analytic Talk Show with Stacey Barr
“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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The seven habits of analyst rock stars!
Implement and practice these seven habits to make your work relevant, timely and actionable for the business and your customers!
- Collect, discuss and understand the questions that matter for your customers and business owners. Working with the business, determine how valuable the various questions are and whether they can be acted upon. How much time should be spent on this work? Is it better to take a simple approach and deliver a rapid answer and then revisit it more in-depth? Remember that the first step is the most important step! If you don’t actively engage in this step, you will lose a lot of your time and opportunity to positively impact the business.
- Collect and clean the best available data for the identified questions. Implement a strategy to capture and enrich the analytic data used across multiple projects.
- Explore the data sources to understand high level trends and exceptions. Leverage rapid graphs and simpler analytic methods here…
- Understand key interactions, trends, sources of effect & possible causes. Use clear graphs in a simple, short presentation to explain key findings for business owners.
- Communicate the right amount of information and conclusions in the language of the audience. What matters to them? Don’t be afraid to make recommendations based on your work! Don’t be offended if they don’t follow all of your recommendations, there are many factors beyond your findings that will affect what is implemented. When creating your presentation, apply the 10/20/30 rule of Guy Kawasaki- no more than 10 slides in 20 minutes and no text smaller than 30 point font!
- Collaborate with the business to act on the findings. Seek long-term business opportunities to seamlessly integrate analytics.
- Continue to learn from and listen to the business! The more you listen to the business the more they will listen to you!
As you practice these habits, especially step 1, you will eliminate one of the biggest complaints I hear from analysts- that their work isn’t appreciated or understood often enough in the business. Step 1 is about active listening, understanding context of problems and prioritization. Unfortunately, most analysts and statistical experts have never received any training in this area!
At Freakalytics, we are pleased to offer custom training for your technical and analytic teams. Using a series of short workshops, we can coach your team to better understand, practice and gain confidence in applying these habits. Please contact us for more details.
→ 1 Comment- Add YoursThe Value of a Great Analyst- About $3M per Year!
I recently pondered the value of a great analyst to a mid-sized public company (revenues around $1-2 billion.) Based on my experience at multiple companies, I estimate the productivity, typical project benefits, and costs of an average, good and great analyst. The differences in the return to a company are staggering with great analysts yielding double the ROI of a good analyst and triple the ROI of an average analyst!
My conservative estimates of analyst project results (annual value to the firm) are $460k for average analysts, $1.2m for good analysts and $3.1m for great analysts!
There are two primary drivers behind the much higher value produced by great analysts (illustrated in the following graph):
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Data Presentation Principles Part 1- Poor presentation of data
Why don’t you just show me the numbers?
- Poor presentation of data can make informative interpretation difficult or even impossible.
- We spend years diagramming sentences & solving equations but have minimal exposure to telling stories with data!
- The ability to explore, understand and utilize real-world data is a rare skill that can dramatically improve your organization and career.
Sample revenue data from a university
| College | Quarter | Total Revenue | Tuition | Research | Plan Revenue |
| Arts | 2009-01 | $5,510,268 | $5,230,198 | $280,070 | $6,000,000 |
| Design | 2009-01 | $703,770 | $408,762 | $295,008 | $680,000 |
| Engineering | 2009-01 | $25,139,083 | $6,201,932 | $18,937,151 | $26,800,000 |
| Sciences | 2009-01 | $4,439,991 | $2,159,010 | $2,280,981 | $4,400,000 |
A prickly example – Excel chart defaults
Excel defaults are looking sharp, yet uninformative. Read the rest of this entry »
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