Displaying information quickly in tabular form

The Spotfire Table Plot visualization is a simple way of visualizing tabular data. You can think of a table of data in the same way as a Microsoft Excel worksheet, but that's only the beginning. People will nearly always want to see the "underlying data," that is, the details behind any visualization you create. The table plot visualization meets this need.

Let's create a table plot as a details visualization from the scatter plot we created earlier in this chapter:

1. Right-click on the scatter plot visualization, click Create Details Visualization, and then select Table...:

1. This will create a default table plot that displays details of the data that was selected in the main visualization.
2. Try clicking on or marking points (markers) in the main visualization and watch how the table plot changes. In this case, I have marked all countries in Oceania by clicking on Oceania in the legend:

1. Adjust the Region-Sub-region-Country hierarchy slider and click on individual markers on the plot—notice how the table plot shows that a single (aggregated) marker in the scatter plot can contain multiple rows of data, or just one data row, depending on the level of aggregation being performed.

There is always more than one way to do the same thing in Spotfire, and this is particularly true for the manipulation of visualizations. Let's start with some very quick manipulations of the table plot:

• To move a column, left-click the column name, hold, drag, and drop.
• To make a column wider or narrower, hover the mouse over the right-hand edge of the column title until you see the cursor change to a two-way arrow, and then click and drag.

• To adjust the settings of an individual column, click on the column header. This causes a popup menu to appear:

From this menu, you can do the following:

• Change the column sorting—None, ascending (from small to large values), and descending, respectively.
• Adjust column sizing (to fit the data or an explicit column width).
• Move the column to be the first or last shown.
• Adjust the header display. Two points of note: the tick mark means that the header should align the same as the underlying data (left for string data, right for numerical data, and so on); changing one of these settings will affect all columns. If you want to change the setting of a single column, make sure that you check Style this individually before adjusting the setting.
• Adjust the value alignment—as for the header display.
• Hide the column.
• Set the row height (only in Analyst clients) by right-clicking the column header and choosing Row Height:

These and other properties of the table visualization are also accessed via Visualization Properties. As you work through the various Spotfire visualizations, you'll notice that some types have more options than others, but there are commonalities and an overall consistency in convention.

Visualization properties can be opened in a number of ways:

• By right-clicking on the visualization, which is a table in this case, and selecting Properties
• By going to the Edit menu and selecting Visualization Properties
• By clicking on the cog icon in the top right-hand corner of a visualization
• By clicking the Visualization Properties icon in the icon tray below the main menu bar

It's beyond the scope of this book to explore every property and option. The context-sensitive help provided by Spotfire is excellent and explains all the options in detail.