Transforming your syndicated data into business insight
Visualization (or visualization in some places) is one of the hottest topics around lately. In fact, I just Googled both spellings and got 191 million hits for the American spelling with a “z”) and 43.4 million hits for the British spelling! Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: “Visualization (or visualisation) is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to […]
This is the third in a series of posts on quantifying the impact of business drivers on sales volume. Please review these other posts on this very useful analytical technique that helps answer the question Why did our volume change? Part 1 – Overview of this very useful analytical technique that helps answer the question Why […]
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 […]
