It's All About the Data

Now that we've had the chance to visualize some data and gain some interesting insights into it, it's time to delve more deeply into the data. Spotfire is all about visualizing data of all different shapes, sizes, and types, so this chapter will provide some background as to how data is managed in Spotfire and, by way of an example, show how you can work with Spotfire data in more detail.

In this chapter, you will learn how to visualize real-world data using a scatter plot. You will follow along as we use Spotfire to reconstruct a very famous visualization that shows world population growth and child mortality rates. You'll learn how to combine multiple datasets in order to add additional value to your data. Along the way, you'll also learn about working with hierarchical data in Spotfire and pick up some hints and tips for producing best-practice visualizations and analyses, and how to get the best out of them.

We'll be covering the following topics in this chapter:

• Understanding the basic row/column structure of a data table
• Exploring key data types
• Building a scatter plot with real-world data:
  • Combining data
  • What is a scatter plot?
  • Building the scatter plot using population growth versus child mortality
  • Working with natural hierarchies in data
  • Getting insight from the scatter plot
• Displaying information quickly in tabular form
• Enriching visualizations with color categorization
• Visualizing hierarchical data using treemaps