The Scatter Plot visualization, for me, is one of the most powerful and versatile analytic tools in your visualization tool kit. The scatter plot's main strength is in the exploration of relationships between variables, height and weight, for example. Using just the x- and y-axes, you can conduct a simple two-dimensional analysis. However, the color, shape, size, and trellis properties provided by Spotfire offer the potential to increase the dimensionality of your analysis when it makes sense to do so.

As well as visualizing the correlation (or lack of correlation) between two variables, a scatter plot can reveal unusual and nonlinear trends, clusters, gaps, and, crucially, outliers in the data.

Let's take another look at the baseball data. Remember we looked at run totals and salary levels for the different teams using a bar chart, and we were able to get a sense of how much value for money the different teams appeared to be getting. The scatter...