Big Data News, Analytics, Data Visualization

In this analysis, we will visualize the relation between the Age at Presidency, State of Birth and birth sign.

Read more at: www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/presidents-of-usa-and-their-birth-signs-sankey-visualization

The hourly rate in any consulting business or practice increases by the years of experience in the field.

Read more at: http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/us-consumer-law-attorney-rates

Bigfoot and UFO remain elusive but know their ways to make news from time to time.

Read more at: http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/bigfoot-vs-ufo-analytics

If we look into the SEC data for Microsoft and other tech companies, Microsoft spends the most in Research and Development from [by dollar]

Read more at: http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/list-of-acquisitions-by-microsoft-a-data-journey

If number of searches were an indicator for gauging the popularity of a drink between Tea, Coffee, Beer and Wine then who wins the contest?

Which drink is gaining popularity and which is losing?

Read more at: http://www.infocaptor.com/dashboard/popularity-of-tea-coffee-beer-and-wine-visualization

Data source : http://www.bls.gov/emp/tables.htm#occtables

Fastest growing job industry

Original Visualization

Most rapidly declining job industry

Rapidly declining jobs link

InfoCaptor released the free online dashboard for every small business user in the entire universe.

The free dashboard is available at https://my.infocaptor.com and it is one of the most innovative dashboard in the Business Intelligence world.

With the online dashboard a small biz owner can automate its entire business reporting and set it on auto-pilot.

As a small business owner or a startup founder, there are gazillions of tasks that need to be performed on a day to day basis. If this is not enough the task list for a small operation keeps changing on a day to day basis. It is like a never ending loop of tasks that automatically get lined up for you to finish them.

Reporting and dashboards is very crucial for any business to survive and grow. Today InfoCaptor empowers this startup founders and small biz owners to use this free business intelligence tool, setup the key metrics, display them on a spare monitor and set it on auto-pilot. From time to time keep making tweaks to it and that is all needed to start your own monitoring system.

For little data savvy dashboards where you want to display critical financial information, sometimes you need the software in-house.

InfoCaptor has released the self hosted dashboard solution that you can easily deploy it on your own computer, laptop or central server within your department.

This is an amazing option and everyone should take benefit of this opportunity.

Whether you deal with Big Data or small Data, InfoCaptor self hosted solution will work efficiently for your needs.

You can check the Dashboard solutions

If you wish to test drive the self hosted solution then grab this download link

And here are the instructions on how to install Dashboard and start on your local PC

I am a single owner of my company and product. Naturally, I rely heavily on search engine to bring me the traffic. Over the past years I did heavy google adwords marketing and it worked great for me. But managing adwords is a kind of a part time job so I started reducing the budget and spent more time in gaining exposure through other channels. If you look at my google analytics, it becomes clear that Google is my sole breadwinner and that is joyful and scary at the same time,yep!

But I can do nothing about it, can I? In the early days, I would work very hard to just get on the top 100 list for the keywords ‘BI Dashboards’. I would tweak and tweak my website content. I did not know anything about SEO. So I started learning about it. But still all my efforts were to please the Google lady!

Dashboard software is heavily dominated by the big fish like Oracle, Cognos, SAP and so on. I unknowingly fell into the ocean filled with these sharks. They have armies of sales people who sell their products. My software is no match with what they offer. I had way too less features and was desktop based software. Slowly I found my niche in the small business section. Now everybody defines small businesses through their own lens and how big they themselves are. But for my company, a small business is someone who finds my software just functional enough and pricing irresistible.

My resources were limited and time was locked in constant product improvement. So Adwords rescued me! It allowed for me as a single owner to set aside few hundred dollars and guarantee a minimum number of leads to my website, a percentage of which converts to sale and a percentage of the sales goes into the adwords budget. Nowadays I no longer login to adwords even though I have running campaigns. Without google adwords I wouldn’t have gotten my business to where it is right now.

Recently came across a friend’s website and his analytics revealed that he gets 4 times my traffic and Google search occupies a tiny slice on his pie chart. Vow! that is amazing. So there are so many other ways to generate traffic (social media, article submission etc) and since google is a tiny slice for him, I told him that he has so much room and could increase his traffic many folds by concentrating on SEO.

I believe adwords is a necessary expense/investment for every small business but also need to work on changing the Pie chart that shows Google as the biggest referral. Is adwords working for you?

Databases are often under lock-n-key of the IT Department and not possible to connect directly due to security reasons. So if you plan to build a Dashboard prototype or a Dashboard Mockup it makes sense to export the data to Excel and build it.

Modular Dashboard Design
Lot of the online tutorials and Dashboard e-books teach you to build dashboard in Excel file. They provide you with templates, you fill in the information and build the dashboard using Excel charting techniques.

If you use Excel Templates for your real dashboarding needs then you may end up with any of the below problems.

” Big Bulky and bloated excel files
” Undocumented Macros
” Zero verification on the data authencity
” No way to refresh the dashboard (lost productivity)

“Best Practise for Dashboard Design”
Modular Design – Keep Data and Presentation Separate
How? – Use Excel only for storing your data. Nothing more.

Do not build any visualization in the same place where your Data resides.

Benefits of this approach
” Your dashboard or presenation layer is independent – Dashboard definition is stored separately
” Increased productivity – When you have fresh data just refresh the dashboard, no redevelopment needed
” No Messy Excel Macros or coding knowledge required – Just drag and drop tables and visually build Tables, Charts, Speedometer, Gauges, Dials, Thermometers and more charts
” Simplified Distribution and Presentation – You can Export the Dashboard to PDF or HTML and just send them as attachments
” Save Time – Just build the dashboard presentation layer only once and automate the refreshes.

Lets begin Building Dashboard

Data Preparation

Export your transaction data to Excel file by running a report or requesting your IT department.

There are certain rules to be followed when you get the data in Excel files.

Here is a sample Excel dump of Order Entry data.
The first row is always treated as the column names.

If you inherit an Excel file with pivots and charts all over the places then try to copy just the raw data in another worksheet in the same file or create another file. If it is not possible to keep the first row as the column names then you could define “named ranges”. In the dashboard designer it is possible to access the data using Cell ranges but then future updates to the Excel file could break the dashboard, for e.g if the data goes beyond the Cell range.

NOTE: Make sure column names do not have any funky characters. Just keep it to simple alpha-numeric column names.