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.
Yup, works now! 🙂
Thanks.
Well unfortunately the URL you point us to is still not setup 🙁
The link is correct. He just seems to be running late.
I’ve tried Liza and Tableau. Tableau does not support ODBC connections if I remember correctly. Lyza is an intuitive and “out-of-the-box” experience. Tableau is not. I’m not sure I would even put the two in the same bucket, quite honestly. I discuss these types of BI tools at
http://jeromepineau.blogspot.com/2009/04/on-demand-bi-beyond-smb.html
Congratulations to Joe for his new site launch!
Joe recently sent me an analysis of inflation data using Tableau. (thanks to Mike Cristiani)
While he told me he wasn’t happy with it yet, I found the work to be quite well done. There were subtle aspects of the visualization that were unusual which improved the visual quality of the work.
I for one will actively follow his blog. The creative use of Tableau and Lyza will be of interest to many who follow his tweets regarding Tableau.
I also see potential for converging tools like Tableau, Quantrix Modeler & DataNAV, BonaVista Microcharts and yes…even Excel.
The cost of moving from Question to Insight is falling.