Si Blog

Frequency of values and distinct count of values

2008-12-11T19:45:00Z

Have you ever wanted to see how many times a value appears in the data, so you casually dropped the 'Value' dimension onto the rows panel of a pivot widget and the 'Count Value' measure onto the columns panel and get the value '1' for everything? Then you scratched your head and said to yourself "hmm, this can't be right. I'm pretty sure I sold more than one Acer 2400 this month". Relax, you're not going out of business :-) There are two ways to count...(read more)

Filter a Widget With a Click Of a Button

2008-12-08T11:14:00Z

Have you ever wanted to give your viewers the possibility to filter a widget with a single click? Somewhat like the image below, that lets a user click on either the Best Selling Products or Least Selling Products and see the appropriate products in the pivot and their respective sales, cost and profit. Here's how you do it. ............................................................................................................................................................................(read more)

Question Composition - Quickly Create Filters and Segmentation in a Flowchart Manner

2008-11-18T17:27:00Z

Some of you may have probably noticed that apart from sheets, a Prism document may also contains 'questions'. Unlike a sheet that is used to visualize data, a question is a special type of canvas used to visually create filters and segment data. It is also useful for observing the structure of a complex filter. Defining a Dimensionality or Base Filter The first thing to decide before beginning is which dimension you wish to filter. Once decided, drag this dimension from the Data Browser and...(read more)

Pivot-like Excel Data to Flat Excel Data for Better Analysis and Reporting (Unpivot)

2008-11-14T16:05:00Z

Sometimes, data in an Excel file is not structured ideally to be imported by Prism. Occasionally, the data is presented in a Pivot-like manner that is more readable and takes up less storage space. A good example for this is marketing survey data that often comes in this form: Image 1 - Marketing Survey Data Sample Each row represents the answers of a single survey respondent. The first respondent - John, gave the answer ‘Good' to the first question, the answer ‘Best' to the second question...(read more)

Surviving tough economic times in IT

2008-10-30T13:51:00Z

Dennis Howlett quotes Sun Microsystems' Tim Bray on surviving the tough economic times . John Doerr lists ten points for companies to stay afloat on Venture Beat . Being frugal has become hip, there's no doubt about that. Both people quoted above suggest cutting software spending and large capex IT investments. We wanted to add our top software and IT cutting strategies.... And then say something about cutting expenses on business intelligence, dashboards and reporting. Business Intelligence...(read more)

Re-using Filters in Widgets and Custom Measures

2008-08-24T13:05:00Z

If you’ve dug around the product and/or the online documentation, you must have encountered the filtering and segmentation features Prism offers. If not, this is a good time to get acquainted with this powerful feature here . The first advantage of a Prism filter is that it allows you to filter your dimensions to focus only on the members that interest you, such as your best customers in terms of sales, products with a positive selling growth, the 20% of customers that account for 80% of your revenue...(read more)

SiSense Prism for Google Spreadsheets or: Now you can create a dashboard with Google Spreadsheets

2008-08-04T08:56:00Z

For some time now, we've been looking at including Google spreadsheets as one of the data sources that SiSense Prism supports. We've just launched this, in a public beta, and I wanted to tell you why I think this is an important move. Our philosophy is to support as many data sources as possible. We want to enable the user to do IT-less business intelligence: analytics, charting and dashboarding, on any data source. In the future we'll mash up the different data sources, catapulting everyone...(read more)

From Business Intelligence to Domestic Intelligence - Manage your personal expenses

2008-07-16T16:33:00Z

We're used to think about BI in terms of business use only. But BI is applicable at home too. If we have the tool to analyze any sort of data, why not use it at home? Here's an example: Most credit card companies let you download your personal spending data in Excel format. I put all these Excel files into one big file, and connected to it with Prism. Then I created a dashboard that shows me the important things I want to know when I go over my expenses: The beautiful thing about dashboards...(read more)

Private beta for Amazon S3

2008-07-01T16:09:00Z

We've just released a private beta for Amazon S3 users. The idea is that if you use Amazon's Simple Storage Service (that's where the S3 comes from) you get information about what you're using, why and how much it costs you. However, all the S3 information comes in as a log, but what if you'd like to show your boss a dashboard that looks more like Google Analytics?. (you can't use Google Analytics here - since you can't insert an html tag into the S3 parts of your site...(read more)

Customers who bought this book, also bought... Hmm... Basket Analysis.

2008-05-07T14:09:00Z

One day I was browsing around Amazon looking for a book about some boring technical stuff (diving into the company pocket is always a good way to start a lazy morning). When I finally found the book I was looking for, I immediately got a list of products who were bought by other customers who also bought my book (try saying that three times fast). Amazon have had this feature for as long as I can remember (it's called Collaborative Filtering), but being a bit of a data freak - that feature was...(read more)

Handling currency conversions

2008-05-07T11:59:00Z

Ok, this one isn't from me, it's from one of our users who wanted to show us how he handled currency conversions with Prism. Thank you! I've simplified his scenario, just to get the main point across. Note that this user was working with Excel files, but this example is just as valid for any data source with similar data. Remember, as far as Prism is concerned, all data sources were created equal! Imagine an Excel file with the following data in it: What the user was trying to do is create...(read more)

Showing the most recent data in a Dashboard

2008-05-07T10:56:00Z

Prism dashboards often contain a Date Picker or a Drop-down List that affects the entire dashboard. This is very useful when you wish to go back and forward in time, and see the figures for the selected time period(s). Usually, when I refresh the entire dashboard, I wish to see the most recent data. Meaning, having the dashboard present the information in terms of the most recent date available in the database. Instead of going back to the Drop-down List, scrolling down and selecting the last member...(read more)

Using "Actions" to reduce database workload

2008-05-06T21:56:00Z

A typical dashboard or report has several widgets that require query execution in order to present up-to-date results. Some widgets may need to be updated frequently, some on a daily basis, or on a weekly basis - and so on. After you are done creating a dashboard, you can easily refresh it (by clicking F5 or clicking the Refresh button). If you're information hungry like me, you find yourself doing that quite often. If your dashboard is created over an Excel or CSV file, this is not really a...(read more)

Analyzing website user activity, disregarding your own company and/or fake users

2008-05-06T18:17:00Z

Hi everyone, Since the Web 2.0 boom, many of our users are companies that have websites which are the foundation of their business. These users often use Prism to analyze user activity on their site. The table(s) they use to perform this analysis usually hold a unique identifier for a user (the email, for example), the company they belong to, etc. With Prism, It takes exactly 10 minutes to create a live dashboard that tells you, in real-time, exactly what you need to know about user activity. However...(read more)

Data Field Types and the Dimensional Model

2008-05-06T17:29:00Z

How does Prism decide what the data type of each field is when I connect to a data source? This is a question that keeps popping up, usually because it has direct implications on the type of analysis you can later perform on these fields. More specifically: Numeric Fields can act as regular dimensions as well as measures, with any type of aggregation (Sum, Avg, Min, Max, Count, DistinctCount) Textual Fields can act as regular dimensions as well as measures, limited to the Count and DistinctCount...(read more)