Lyza and Tableau according to Mako

Back in February when I heard about Lyza, I thought right away of Tableau. Despite each one’s different strengths in data discovery and analysis, each appeals to the same broad group.

It’s an old group that’s getting new attention: creative analysts, or “cowboy analysts” to some. The like their data raw, not aggregated. They ask questions, forage, synthesize, analyze, and publish.

Joe Mako is one of them. Tomorrow, he’s launching a website for people like himself who use both Tableau and Lyza. Makometrics will publish every Monday morning and sometimes more often.

Joe is a network engineer at a Midwest ISP. He started at the tech support desk, where he saw how much help people needed looking at their data. “They didn’t understand exploring data,” he says. “They just don’t care.” But Joe cared enough to help with data analysis, and pretty soon someone gave him a tag line: “Make it happen with Mako.”

Posts he’s lined up so far:

• He’ll walk through data analysis problems from challenge to resolution. “I’ll be practicing something akin to the cycle of visual analysis.” (See the Tableau video “The Zen of Visual Analysis.”)
• Analysis of strengths and weaknesses of Tableau and Lyza
• Analysis of his “Visualizing Rambo Kills”: how he approached the dataset, and how he created the final result.
• Demonstrate sophisticated techniques in Lyza and Tableau. He’ll go into detail on such things as combining Lyza’s “previous” and “if” functions and the basics of summary functions like “sumcolumn” and “avgcolumn.”

Check it tomorrow (Wednesday, July 1): makometrics.com.