Summary

You have a come a long way in this chapter, and you should be pleased with the progress you have made. By now you should know how to add data to Spotfire from text, spreadsheet, and data files; link data in Spotfire; and connect Spotfire to a database.

We also covered Spotfire concepts like the inbuilt filters, data table properties, and table relations and column matches in Spotfire

Finally, you picked up a lot of essential data concepts like the basic row/column structure of a data table, different date types, data relationships, how to use ODBC, and data queries using SQL.

I hope this chapter has not been too dull. It is very important that you understand data sources, how to import data into Spotfire, and how to manipulate data. Even the most ingenious visualization or collection of visualizations is only as good as the underlying data. If you get the data part wrong or you can't get the data you want, you are wasting your time, at best, and grossly misleading your analytics consumers, at worst.

This chapter is just a basic foundation in data analysis, but it is sufficient and will serve you well to explore the more visually compelling aspects of Spotfire. Let's go straight to Chapter 2, Visualize This! and start visualizing!