… and points beyond

Over the weekend I have revisited Tableau, enjoyed some success with MonetDB, tried to turn MySQL into a hundred million row data warehouse, been underwhelmed with Firebird, installed Greenplum and spent many frustrated hours with Talend Open Studio, Pentaho Kettle and Jitterbit.
Of course, I could just buy QlikView, but what can be done for less [...]

[Read more →]

What settings do you use for the gauge and bar charts? Watch the video!
Stephen Few, who spoke at the QlikView conference in April, devised the bullet graph a few years ago. A QlikView customer used bullet graphs and sparklines and was very generous to allow QlikTech to post a working demo of their application. I’m [...]

[Read more →]

Stephen Few in his blog recently highlighted bullet graphs.

I wanted to point out a QlikView demo application that uses this technique alongside Tufte’s sparklines. You can download and play with this application or examine the AJAX version.

[Read more →]

Every day, the Economist site adds an original chart.

[Read more →]

I just can’t get enough of the Gapminder software, officially called Trendalyzer. The easy interface is just an enhanced scatter plot but it does the job perfectly. I think a lot of people, like me, were amazed and excited by his talk at TED 2006. He demonstrated that analytics offers real insight and improves efficiency. [...]

[Read more →]

Enrico Bertini at Visuale asks how important is interactivity in information visualization? As a proponent of QlikView, Spotfire, Tableau and others, I think it’s extremely important. Interactivity is the future, it’s “make or break.”
I’ve been implementing speed-of-thought interactive BI tools for 6 years and I don’t want to do it any other way. When I [...]

[Read more →]

I finally got around to watching the Tableau 3.0 webinar. I agree with their very excited presenter that Tableau 3.0 is a leap forward. The support of ad-hoc grouping of dimension elements is excellent as is the enhanced support of ad-hoc sets. The annotations look good and act sensibly. Generally, the new features are focused [...]

[Read more →]

From the Björk shows comes the reactable. The demo is wonderful. Via Boing Boing.

[Read more →]

What and outstanding site! Found on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools blog.

[Read more →]

The Inner Life of the Cell is a mind-expanding animation. Watch the incessant, precise, complex and beautiful activity inside a single white blood cell. Why can’t more educational materials be like this? Here’s a neat writeup about it in Wired. Created by John Liebler. Here’s another version with music instead of narration.

[Read more →]