Freakalytics®

Practical Analytics for Better Decisions

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Tableau 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

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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!

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Explore the data sources to understand high level trends and exceptions. Leverage rapid graphs and simpler analytic methods here…
  4. Understand key interactions, trends, sources of effect & possible causes. Use clear graphs in a simple, short presentation to explain key findings for business owners.
  5. 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!
  6. Collaborate with the business to act on the findings. Seek long-term business opportunities to seamlessly integrate analytics.
  7. 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.

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SAS for Dummies

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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