Transforming your syndicated data into business insight
Has this happened to you? Sales of your brand are down vs. the same period last year and management wants to know why. Sales is saying it’s because there is less advertising this year but Marketing is saying it’s because you’ve lost distribution and the retail price and merchandising are not as competitive. Another, more […]
Despite the promise of software vendors that their “methodologies extract meaningful and actionable insights from Big Data,” my experience is that no methodology can substitute for the human brain of an astute analyst. Great data analysts are a rare and valuable commodity. So what makes for a great one? They know the data inside and […]
For many years, I used Excel and never knew about VLOOKUP. Oh, the hours I wasted! I’m writing this post to save you from the same sad, productivity-sapping fate. What is VLOOKUP? It’s a simple Excel function that allows you to pull information from one data set to another, based on some matching value. While […]
One of the most powerful graphs is the line chart. Line charts allow you to: Decode underlying trends over time Compare trends for different products or markets Explore relationships between different measures In addition to making it easier to see trends, you will typically use a line graph because there’s just too much data to […]
The bar chart is probably the most commonly used type of graph and this post talks about what kind of data this works well for. In this post I’ll talk about using bar charts to compare various products and geographies but for one fact and one time period. This is part of a series of […]
Here’s something fun that I came across this week, as movies were in the news due to the announcement of Oscar nominations: Click here to see Famous Movie Quotes as Charts, from the website Flowingdata.com (January 16, 2014). Note the wide variety of graph types used! This shows that you don’t have to have numerical data […]
