Tag: spotfire

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Integrating Smartsheet with Spotfire

It’s been over three months at my new job and I have already learnt a variety of new things. Working with a brilliant team of developers, I have been exploring the nitty-gritties of Spotfire and unraveling new functionalities every week. While there is a significant difference between the available functionalities for the client and web versions, Spotfire leads my list of best visualization tools to provide business insights. But what I have found most exciting recently is integrating it with Smarstheet.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Smartsheet, as the name suggests, is a smart sheet – essentially an Excel-meets-Trello-meets-Tableau platform. Tying it up with Spotfire gives you a pretty neat solution where on one end, you can create efficient workflows for your team to work directly on the data source and on the other, pull the data in to create great data visuals. To give you a simple example – you can set an automation in Smartsheet to send out email reminders to different members of your team to populate cells assigned to them and this data can then be pulled into the corresponding Spotfire dashboard. The only catch here is – you would need a Smartsheet business license to connect Smartsheet to Spotfire using the Live Data Connector.

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As I continue to monitor things that are new in upcoming versions of Spotfire by following Neil Kanungo’s enlightening Dr. Spotfire sessions, I plan to keep an eye out for other such integrations to help my team build efficient processes and deliver fast, accurate business insights.

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Why I have Immense Respect for the Developer Community

Watching how genius coders are portrayed in movies and TV shows, I grew up with the impression that they are smug, arrogant, and often delusional. My experience interacting with them in the last couple of years has proved otherwise.

Be it the TIBCO Spotfire community where even the lead data scientists provide exceptional support and guidance to anyone interested, or the Alexa developers slack channel where patient SDEs answer your questions in great detail – the developer community has proven to be extremely welcoming and helpful. For instance, Justin Jeffress does a marvelous job hosting Alexa office hours on their Twitch channel where he answers questions from developers at all levels of expertise. Similarly, Neil Kanungo from Spotfire hosts great Dr. Spotfire sessions every month helping Spotfire developers get better at visualization and analytics.

Justin Jeffres hosting Alexa skills office hours

Stackoverflow continues to be the go-to for a bit more intermediate stuff and it is perhaps the only place where I’m still nervous to ask questions. However, even there, experts encourage you to learn in the right manner and point you in the right direction to get you started. If you are into Machine Learning, you are familiar with Andrew Ng, the man who is the pioneer of online education and has released a bunch of free courses on Coursera (which he co-founded).

The tech world is extremely challenging and constantly changing. You cannot stop learning for even a bit as you might get outdated in a jiffy. As such, it is reassuring to know that programmers have each other’s backs. Say what you will about these geeks, they can teach you a thing or two about camaraderie. After my theatre group, this is the second place where I have felt a sense of community and belonging. Nobody cares where you’re from and what the color of your skin is. They are all here to learn, build, and sometimes crack geeky jokes. Respect!

If you’re reading this and have ever helped someone understand the complications of programming – take a bow!

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COVID-19 Data Analysis with Spotfire and IronPython

Tibco Spotfire is an excellent tool for wholistic data analytics solutions. Since I got certified as a Spotfire analyst, I have been working with different datasets to get well-versed with the nitty-gritties of Iron Python scripts in Spotfire. I recently conducted some exploratory data analysis with COVID-19 data and built a dashboard that –

  1. points out trends in countries – those getting better and those getting worse
  2. points out which countries have highest deaths per million and how these are not the same as countries with highest number of cases
  3. describes which continent needs to be alarmed right now
  4. collects user feedback and writes back to the data table using Iron Python

The dashboard uses buttons (Action Controls) to give you graphs of countries that are doing okay and those that need to do better. It also employs property controls and an IronPython script for a user to provide feedback which can then be written back to our data table, and with the right permissions, to our database.

Here is a short video of the COVID-19 Spotfire dashboard, and my commentary on how it works:

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