Chapter 8: Visualize and Discover

Chapter 8: Visualize and Discover Transcript

Visualize is a new feature in IDEA which allows you to explore your data graphically.

Select the Analysis Tab and in the Visualization group, click Visualize. The Visualization module starts up and you are prompted to select a dashboard. We don’t have any yet, so let’s create one. In the chart Properties dialog box, there is a blank area where we can build our chart and options on the right-hand side.

First we need to select a chart type. I want to build a treemap. These charts use a series of rectangles to show various properties of the data in one chart. Select the treemap chart type to display the properties.

Next we need to select a database to explore. Let’s look at Sales Transactions to see if there is anything noteworthy. In the database drop-down, select Sales Transactions database to load it into Visualization. In the Group By field, select which field in the sales transactions you want to use to group your data. I’m going to use Cust_no.

I’m going to color this by sum, total on Amount and size by Count. As soon as I enter this the chart is rendered. The chart shows a bunch of colored boxes with numbers in them. The number is the customer number as determined in the Group by dropdown. The size of the box is determined by the number of transactions – more transactions means a larger box. The color tells me about the value of those transactions. Blue is a lower value, purple is moderate value and red is high value.8.

So the largest box is in the upper left corner with the number 92431. If you hover over this box you will see that this customer has 37 transactions for a sum of 101, 248. Since the size is driven by count, this is the largest box even though it isn’t the largest value. The next box is customer 41500 with 36 transactions for a total of 145, 081. The third box, the red one is customer 60300. This customer has 35 transactions, but a sales total of 3.65 million – more than any other customer on the board.

Change the Group by value to PAY_TYPE and leave the other values as they were. There are three pay types – Amex, Visa and Cash. Amex makes up about half the transactions and represents a lot of money. Visa is still a lot of transactions but less revenue than Amex and cash is quite small on both counts.

I’ll change Group By one more time – this time to PROD_CODE. Here we see that product code 05 makes up the vast majority of all products sold with 834 transactions and accounts for a substantial amount of revenue as indicated by the purple color. But what’s interesting here is product code 06. It only has 3 transactions but earned 3.7 million, more than prod code 05.

Switch the graph to a bar chart to see the Sum of the amount by product code. We see that product code 06 is far greater than 05.

Change the Statistic to Count. We see that Prod code 05 has most of the transactions – just as we saw in the treemap. If you wish to save this chart as a dashboard, click save, select a layout and then click save in the title bar to give the new dashboard a name. Close the dashboard.

 

Now that you’ve seen the Visualize feature, let’s have a look at Discover. Visualize was driven by you and you made the decisions about how to build out your graphics to see what looked interesting. Discover is driven by IDEA.

Open the Sales Transactions database and on the Analysis tab, click Discover. When the dashboard has fully rendered, you’ll see six panels across the top which are populated with information pulled from the field statistics.

Click the properties icon in the first Field Statistics Panel to open the properties dialog. You can adjust the information in the panel by changing either the field, the statistic or both. You can also clear a panel by clicking the Clear button and then selecting Save. The bottom four panels are different views of the data.

Like the Field Statistics panel, these panels are also editable. If you hover your mouse in the panel, a menu will appear in the upper right corner which will allow you to adjust the properties, copy the panel to the clipboard, maximize the panel or switch to the grid view to see the underlying data. Click maximize to have a closer look at the graph.

When you’re finished, click restore to return the graph to its original size in the dashboard.

Next, click the Grid View icon to see the underlying data in datasheet view. Again, this can be maximized to see detail. You can also copy the content to the clipboard to paste it into another program. You can save the graphs Discover generates for you the same way you save dashboards you create yourself. Click the Save icon in the title bar and provide a name for your dashboard and click Save.

When you are finished, close the dashboard by clicking x in the upper right-hand corner to return to IDEA.