As a Senior Business Intelligence consultant with extensive data preparation experience, clients often ask me to recommend a data prep/analytics platform. Whether I recommend KNIME or Alteryx depends on the project requirements and data sources because each product has specific capabilities, pros, and cons. In this blog, I’m going to look at the two tools […]
Over the last month, I’ve come across several problems that clients were encountering with their visuals. In this post I’d like to talk about three of them. These three problems were similar in the sense that they were all solved with lesser known table calculation functions. In each case, I’ll present the problem and how […]
This Master Challenge focuses on the following situation: A client currently has a view that shows the profit and sales figures for every customer. There is a parameter that allows the user to toggle between all the data points and only those data points that are not outliers. In this case, an outlier is defined […]
Recently while working with a client, I came across a challenging scenario: how do you filter the view, using a date filter, without impacting a calculation which included data that didn’t meet the date filter. In this case it was a moving average calculation (i.e., mean of specified time series). This is a tricky situation […]
This is the second in a series of challenges for those that believe they have what it takes to be a Tableau Jedi. The series will call on your understanding of the intricacies of Tableau functionality and their usage. Let’s jump right into it. Say we’re working in Tableau Desktop, we put together a nice […]
I have been closely following and writing about trends in the business intelligence market over the past three years. During this time, I can’t say that I’ve seen any “radically new” trends, and I don’t expect any to emerge in 2017. What I have seen, and anticipate for 2017, is the “evolution” of the dominant […]
The Challenge A common request when analyzing large amounts of data is to evaluate the impact exceptional data has on results. Statistics addresses these needs by offering “median” and “average” when normalizing large numbers of data points. Median selects a data point in the exact center of all data points to define the “normal” value […]
We’re almost halfway through 2015 – hard to believe – and the dynamic arena of business intelligence continues to advance. It’s the vendors that adapt better and faster to this evolving environment that will have the competitive edge. Similarly, the businesses that make the best choice of BI technology, that best fits their operation, will […]
I would like to extend a thank you to everyone who attended our Tableau Data Visualization & Dashboard Seminar last week in Toronto! With record attendance, you helped to make it our best seminar ever! Held at downtown Toronto’s St. Andrews Club and Conference Centre, the seminar drew 106 people. I believe the increase in […]
The ever escalating hype on “business intelligence”, “analytics” and “big data” has made it very difficult to uncover the information that is truly valuable and useful. I recently came across a survey that provides what I consider to be pragmatic information if you are looking to upgrade, supplement or replace your Business Intelligence software, or purchase it for the first time.
