Summary

This chapter has provided an introduction to producing impactful dashboards in Spotfire. Dashboards show answers to "What?" questions of analytics. Drill-in visualizations from dashboards show answers to "Why?" questions. The KPI chart was covered in detail with a real-world example.

You have learned how to use the versatile text area to embed descriptive information and user inputs. You have also learned how to get details of marked items.

Together, we explored some more ways of using details visualizations and the features of Spotfire to gain insight from visualizations. My original assumption of the data was invalid, but I showed that and then guided you through how I worked out what was really going on.

You are well on your way to creating guided analyses and dashboards. Indeed, I hope that the first three chapters have given you a solid understanding of how to get some relevant data into Spotfire, build some visualizations of that data, and enable end users to interact with and customize the analysis. Spotfire is fundamentally an exploration tool, and it's important that you keep exploring and expanding the concepts you are learning. Be curious!

Chapter 4, Sharing Insights and Collaborating with Others, builds on the work we've covered in the first three chapters. It gives examples of how to collaborate with your team members using Spotfire, and much more. I hope you find it useful!