In this chapter, we delved a bit deeper into the world of data analysis. Even if you are only using Spotfire as a conventional visualization tool with well-modeled and standardized data, you will inevitably need to do a little data manipulation to get the visualization analysis right.

You learned some essential techniques for shaping and fine-tuning the data you import into Spotfire for more creative and versatile analysis. You've learned how to create metrics using calculated columns and how to use calculated columns to condition your data. You should also have a good grounding in data hierarchies and the access they give you to more complex calculations on groups of rows.

Moving beyond basic visualization building, you have explored Spotfire's built-in ETL (extract, load, transform) techniques and learned how to merge data rows and columns from multiple sources and create and manipulate narrow and wide tables through pivot and unpivot operations. You have used Spotfire's Information...