The first two chapters showed you how to work with data and create visualizations. This chapter is all about adding context and input controls to your Spotfire analyses. It will show you how to quickly transform even simple analyses into professional and powerful analytical toolkits that you can share with others or even develop for large enterprise audiences. You will learn how to annotate your analyses and add input controls that allow you and others to do "what if" explorations.

You can spend a lot of time shaping and modeling your data, and building cool, insightful visualizations. To realize the full benefit of all your hard work, especially if you intend to share your analysis with anyone, it's really worth spending some extra time considering how the analysis is presented and how easy it is for you and others to change options and parameters.

Even the most static dashboard-style report will usually benefit from the inclusion of some form of user-definable parameters...