R Programming

Matt,

I’ve run into the same things with Major Gifts.  And just recently learned about how to do Box and Wisker type Graphs.  Several tools have them. 

The New Power BI desktop is able to do several types of box plots.  And it can connect directly to the database.

Check out the Power BI Visualization Gallery for all sorts of cool visuals.

https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/

The Mekko Chart can be helpful as well for data sets with large skew.

The Community version of Rapid Miner also does this as long as you can use an MS Excel file as an input source.  However, it can not connect to the database directly.  If you have the paid version $1500 to $2000 per seat the database connection is quite nice.

The output look OK here.  (I’m not going to take the time to load data to excel.)

Knime another freemium tool is also able to do the same thing.  This one will connect directly to a database.  In this case I’ve connected to the T-Stats Data Warehouse.

I don’t like the output from Knime.

I cannot figure out how to make Tableau Public do a Box and Wisker Chart.  There is a menu item.  However in the Public Version almost nothing seems to work.  And you have to share your data publicly.

--Tom

…

718.724.8135

tbrown@BAM.org

From: Self-service Business Intelligence [mailto:groups-selfservicebi@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Matthew Echert
Sent: Friday, March 25, 2016 3:06 PM
To: Thomas Brown <tbrown@bam.org>
Subject: Re: [Self-service Business Intelligence] R Programming

I'm mostly interested in visualizations that go beyond what's currently possible/easy with T-Stats and Excel. When looking at our Major Gifts program in particular, things like average gift size don't tell a useful story because the tiny handful of very large gifts you get (or don't get) in a year really skew the numbers. I've put a lot of time and effort into creating box plots, for example, (something that Excel doesn't do natively, though you can hack a stacked column chart toward the same end.) Sometimes I get to a finished result and then we think it might be interesting to look at a slightly different iteration, and that process eats up so much time. I expect that if I invested the time into learning how to do this in R, it could be a simpler process. Maybe.

I'd also like to see dynamically updating charts--campaign revenue over time vs prior years, for example. We currently have fairly intricate Excel charts that are hand-updated weekly, which obviously makes them vulnerable to data entry errors, not to mention the time we could save if they were automated. I explored ways of doing this with Tableau, but the cost is prohibitive for the use cases I've come up with so far. I've played with accomplishing this in SSRS too, but it is currently way down my list of priorities...!

Matt,

I’ve run into the same things with Major Gifts.  And just recently learned about how to do Box and Wisker type Graphs.  Several tools have them. 

The New Power BI desktop is able to do several types of box plots.  And it can connect directly to the database.

Check out the Power BI Visualization Gallery for all sorts of cool visuals.

https://app.powerbi.com/visuals/

The Mekko Chart can be helpful as well for data sets with large skew.

The Community version of Rapid Miner also does this as long as you can use an MS Excel file as an input source.  However, it can not connect to the database directly.  If you have the paid version $1500 to $2000 per seat the database connection is quite nice.

The output look OK here.  (I’m not going to take the time to load data to excel.)

Knime another freemium tool is also able to do the same thing.  This one will connect directly to a database.  In this case I’ve connected to the T-Stats Data Warehouse.

I don’t like the output from Knime.

I cannot figure out how to make Tableau Public do a Box and Wisker Chart.  There is a menu item.  However in the Public Version almost nothing seems to work.  And you have to share your data publicly.

--Tom

…

718.724.8135

tbrown@BAM.org

From: Self-service Business Intelligence [mailto:groups-selfservicebi@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Matthew Echert
Sent: Friday, March 25, 2016 3:06 PM
To: Thomas Brown <tbrown@bam.org>
Subject: Re: [Self-service Business Intelligence] R Programming

I'm mostly interested in visualizations that go beyond what's currently possible/easy with T-Stats and Excel. When looking at our Major Gifts program in particular, things like average gift size don't tell a useful story because the tiny handful of very large gifts you get (or don't get) in a year really skew the numbers. I've put a lot of time and effort into creating box plots, for example, (something that Excel doesn't do natively, though you can hack a stacked column chart toward the same end.) Sometimes I get to a finished result and then we think it might be interesting to look at a slightly different iteration, and that process eats up so much time. I expect that if I invested the time into learning how to do this in R, it could be a simpler process. Maybe.

I'd also like to see dynamically updating charts--campaign revenue over time vs prior years, for example. We currently have fairly intricate Excel charts that are hand-updated weekly, which obviously makes them vulnerable to data entry errors, not to mention the time we could save if they were automated. I explored ways of doing this with Tableau, but the cost is prohibitive for the use cases I've come up with so far. I've played with accomplishing this in SSRS too, but it is currently way down my list of priorities...!