Book Image

TIBCO Spotfire: A Comprehensive Primer. - Second Edition

By : Andrew Berridge, Michael Phillips
Book Image

TIBCO Spotfire: A Comprehensive Primer. - Second Edition

By: Andrew Berridge, Michael Phillips

Overview of this book

The need for agile business intelligence (BI) is growing daily, and TIBCO Spotfire® combines self-service features with essential enterprise governance and scaling capabilities to provide best-practice analytics solutions. Spotfire is easy and intuitive to use and is a rewarding environment for all BI users and analytics developers. Starting with data and visualization concepts, this book takes you on a journey through increasingly advanced topics to help you work toward becoming a professional analytics solution provider. Examples of analyzing real-world data are used to illustrate how to work with Spotfire. Once you've covered the AI-driven recommendations engine, you'll move on to understanding Spotfire's rich suite of visualizations and when, why and how you should use each of them. In later chapters, you'll work with location analytics, advanced analytics using TIBCO Enterprise Runtime for R®, how to decide whether to use in-database or in-memory analytics, and how to work with streaming (live) data in Spotfire. You'll also explore key product integrations that significantly enhance Spotfire's capabilities.This book will enable you to exploit the advantages of the Spotfire serve topology and learn how to make practical use of scheduling and routing rules. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to build and use powerful analytics dashboards and applications, perform spatial analytics, and be able to administer your Spotfire environment efficiently
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Introducing Spotfire
6
Section 2: Spotfire In Depth
12
Section 3: Databases, Scripting, and Scaling Spotfire

Getting started with loading data

The simplest way to get started with loading data into Spotfire is to import some data from a file such as an Excel spreadsheet, so that's what this tutorial will cover.

Important! Before you start, you must be in Editing mode. I will periodically remind you of this throughout this book. The analyst client defaults to Editing mode—other clients, such as the web client, may not. So, beware!

To switch to Editing mode, follow these steps:

  1. In the top right-hand corner of the application, click the dropdown.
  2. Choose Editing:
  1. If Editing mode is not available to you, it means that you do not have the correct permissions (license) for editing, or that the Spotfire client itself does not support it (for example, the Android or IOS clients).

Importing Excel spreadsheets into Spotfire

The procedures for importing comma-separated values (CSV) files or Microsoft Excel spreadsheets in Spotfire are essentially identical:

  1. From the Spotfire home page (shown initially when launching the Analyst or web clients), select Browse local file...:
  1. You will be presented with a standard Open File dialog, allowing you to navigate to the file that you want to load. For this example, let's use some publicly available data on the Titanic disaster—it can be downloaded from the following link:
    http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/pub/Main/DataSets/titanic3.xls
    or: http://bit.ly/2HStQ7R.
  1. In the Analyst client, Spotfire will open a dialog, which will allow you to define the import settings:
  1. The first thing to notice is the Worksheet selection dropdown at the very top of the dialog window. Spotfire can only import one worksheet at a time. There is only one sheet in our file, so we don't need to do anything with this option.
  2. The next thing to notice is the preview of the data and its structure. Spotfire will automatically detect and assign column headers and data types, but you can change any of these settings. You can also tell Spotfire not to import specific columns or rows.
  3. We want to open the file with all defaults, so we're just going to click OK, but please do explore the drop-down options for columns and rows and experiment with the settings. The core philosophy of Spotfire is discovery, so start as you mean to continue and explore some of the options.
  4. Once you click OK, Spotfire will show the Add data to analysis display:
  1. Click OK to load the data.