Spotfire Tips & Tricks: Histograms made easy with Spotfire Data Panel

Quick Histogram

Numeric in-memory columns can be visualized as a histogram by clicking the histogram preview in the expanded data panel. In the image below, histogram of the Garden column (how much each customer purchased in Garden department) is viewed using expanded data panel.  It provides quick insights into data. User has ability to view basic information about numeric column and at the same time can quickly add this distribution as visualization for further drill down. Click the histogram and the visualization will be added to the active page.

Empty Value Replacement

The Data panel also provides ability to replace empty Values. There is only one value, which is empty for this data.

Data Type and Formatting updates

User can also change data types of columns and define your formatting – All With One Click Actions!

Spotfire also provides preview capability for changes made, making it intuitive to use.

Custom Bins

For the histogram, bins are equal in size by default. You can select a slider to select a number of bins, which are 20 as per the image above. Spotfire provides an easy and simple way to define custom bins that may be based on specific limits, Standard deviation, or substring binning in case of string values. This new Binned column can be used like any other data column.

You can learn more about Histograms here.