One of the new features of TIBCO Spotfire version 3.2 is called Lists. Many of you who have been around since the DecisionSite days will find the functionality very similar to the Portfolio tool, with a few key additions. In an earlier post, we discussed various methods for adding categories into our analysis. With Lists, you have an additional method, which is very similar with tags, but also different in the following ways:
' You can add annotations, or knowledge, on the items in your List to save and share the insights
' Your List exists in a separate file outside of your document and can be applied across many analysis sessions
' You can use some logical operations to easily search for and compare items in a List
The best way to explain the capabilities above is with an example. Let's assume we are looking at sales from a chain of stores. We mayhave identified during our analysis a couple of customers who we want to 'watch', either because they are big spenders and we want to make sure they continue to keep purchasing items, or maybe they return a lot of items, and we want to monitor them moving forward. Or maybe they are regular purchasers of a given brand.
Just like with Tags, we can create a new list, called 'Customers to Watch', and can include the customers that fit into our criteria mentioned above. The easiest way to accomplish this is by marking the customers and then selecting the 'New List from Marked'' command.
When you have done this, you will see the Lists panel is updated with your new List.
This List can then be exported into a TIBCO Spotfire Lists file (.lists). The benefit of this is it can be applied to other documents you have which also contain information about customers.
Adding Knowledge into your Analysis
In addition to the ability to use the Lists to classify your data, you can also add additional knowledge about your analysis. This concept is called Annotations. Let's say we are interested in watching one of our customers more closely as a potential person to be our new spokesperson. We can find the customer in the List and choose to add an annotation from the 'List Item Properties' dialog.
When the analysis is opened later or when the List is used with another analysis file, we can search for the annotations and find the necessary customer id.
List Logic Operations
In a future post, we will discuss the list logic capabilities for Lists, and walk through an example of how you can classify customers into different purchasing categories and then use the list logic capabilities to compare customers who fall into a specific purchasing habit (for example, those who purchase Brand A but never purchase Brand B or C).
