How long should my presentation be?

Always leave them wanting more! –P.T. Barnum Creator of “The Greatest Show On Earth!®“ About our Presentation Length Calculator Creating compelling presentations that are clear and actionable are the lifeblood of successful analyst teams. Often, analysts have worked on problems for days or weeks and have much more material to present than is relevant or … Read more

Communicate Your Results, a Case Study from
the 7th C of The Accidental Analyst

You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere. –LEE IACOCCA Engineer on the original Ford Mustang design team and CEO during Chrysler’s comeback in the 1980’s.   From the Seven C’s of Data Analysis Framework     Maria is a Senior Sales Analyst for an … Read more

Open source editor for D3 data visualization

At Freakalytics, we’ve used the D3 data visualization library on several client projects and have been impressed with the nearly infinite set of graphing, charting and mapping possibilities.  Unfortunately, we were less impressed with the high learning curve, level of effort and complexity involved in developing and customizing the desired visualizations. Perhaps you have seen … Read more

RStudio Keyboard Quick Reference by Freakalytics

RStudio-example-ggvis-interactive-graphs-300At Freakalytics, we frequently use R (often referred to as RStats) in our client projects and wanted to share our success using the RStudio Interactive Development Environment (IDE) with you. So, we created the RStudio® Keyboard Quick Reference by Freakalytics. It is available to you, compliments of Freakalytics, as a PDF and later in this article as a searchable data table.
 
 
The RStudio IDE was built by the team at RStudio to make you more productive in the R world. It is a free, open source application for Windows, Linux, Mac and UNIX desktop users. RStudio Desktop includes an interactive R console, a smart editor that supports direct code execution, graphing interfaces, code history, a debugger and project management for R code and related files.
 
Download the RStudio® Keyboard Quick Reference by Freakalytics. The reference card is available as a PDF download for your convenience. The PDF version is printable and usable in most e-book applications.
 
In addition the PDF version, we are pleased to share online access to the RStudio® Keyboard Quick Reference as a searchable data table (click here to access the searchable data table in a dedicated window.) This searchable data table has all the shortcuts from the PDF -and- advanced shortcuts not shown on the PDF version (which is one-page for newer users of R).

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From Business Intelligence to Visual Analytics
Craft a Winning Data Strategy

Stephen McDaniel and Eileen McDaniel, Ph.D. Freakalytics, LLC Topics: Data Analysis, Visual Analytics and Business Intelligence This was originally published in the TDWI FlashPoint Newsletter in August of 2014 Italicized sections, images and their captions were not part of the TDWI version. Until recently, visual analytics was considered a niche area. Those days are quickly … Read more

Three great data visualization stories from Qlik World 2014

At the Qlik World 2014 expert data visualization panel, moderated by Donald Farmer, Donald asked each panelist to offer up one of our favorite data visualizations for inspiration and learning. Alberto Cairo, Visualization at The University of Miami, offered up John Snow’s 1854 map of London that helped demonstrate that cholera was spread by contaminated … Read more

Favorite charts for business analytics

I was asked by Donald Farmer of Qlik about my favorite charts.  Donald is leading a keynote panel on data visualization at Qlik’s World Conference with myself, Alberto Cairo and Kaiser Fung. While I can’t say that I have a favorite chart, I can definitely state that I often rely heavily on three chart types for much of … Read more

Great vs good analysts, software obsessions and informing executives

Charts and graphs to inform Are your charts and graphs actually informing people? Can I actually make a decision from your presentation? If not, why should I or the executives care? Cool software, but what about the business? It’s easier to obsess over the complex but oh so cool software features than to truly understand … Read more