What Do You Primarily Use to Analyze and/or Visualize Data? [POLL]

Posted by Nathan / May 19, 2008 to Software / 30 comments

In elementary school through high school, I always used Microsoft Excel for my charts and graphs (and use it to clean data every now and then). In undergrad, I learned all of my programming in C++ and Java and did a little bit of engineering stuff in MATLAB. When statistics rolled along, I always analyzed data using R.

Then I got into data visualization, and for a while it was all about Processing. When I interned for The New York Times, I used a lot of Adobe Illustrator (and still really enjoy playing with it). Lately, I've been immersed in Actionscript.

So what do you use to make sense of data?

If your weapon of choice isn't listed, I'd be interested to know what your "other" tool is in the comments, because, well, there's always more fun stuff to learn.

What do you primarily use to analyze and/or visualize data?
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Comments

  • kb
    May 19, 2008, 2:19 am

    IDL

  • todd.
    May 19, 2008, 2:45 am

    Matlab. Mathematica, sometimes.

  • Jouni K. Seppänen
    May 19, 2008, 2:47 am

    Python, with Matplotlib for visualization and iPython as the interactive shell

  • Tim
    May 19, 2008, 3:35 am

    Python with Nodebox.

  • Noah Iliinsky
    May 19, 2008, 3:37 am

    Most of my work has been qualitative diagrams, so I’m not particularly numbers-focused most of the time. For diagramming I use OmniGraffle Pro. For large data sets I’m fond of a combination of Perl and DOT.

    Actionscript seems to be the most useful next language for me to learn.

  • Greg
    May 19, 2008, 5:43 am

    Python w/ matplotlib & vtk

  • Diana
    May 19, 2008, 7:09 am

    For us, common mortals, MS Excel is the “weapon of choice”. I know SAS from my statistics course but have never been good at it (my major is in accountancy and audit). SAS might be good for analysing data, but not so much for visualising it (or at least I’m not familiar enough with good methods)

    It is my first visit to this site so I’m going to take a good look at it, seems intriguing.

  • ap
    May 19, 2008, 8:38 am

    Prefuse.

  • ap
    May 19, 2008, 8:39 am

    Spotfire.

  • Yann Abraham
    May 19, 2008, 9:25 am

    R for analysis and ’scientific’ graphs, tableau for visualization

  • the Rising Jurist
    May 19, 2008, 9:36 am

    I mostly rock the pen and paper, because it ends up being faster than trying to get a program to show what I want. I’ve been playing around with Google’s Chart API lately, though. It is only good for certain types of data, but its simplicity is nice.

  • Vince
    May 19, 2008, 9:48 am

    IDL, JMP, Spotfire

  • Andrew
    May 19, 2008, 10:05 am

    I marked Excel, but I also use SAS’s JMP quite a bit.

  • Will
    May 19, 2008, 10:43 am

    I prefer matlab for visualization. The gui command window makes inpecting easy and the plotting tools are robust and reliable.

  • Angel
    May 19, 2008, 11:06 am

    I hate to admit that I primarily use SAS.. but I use it with the caveat that it’s just to get an idea of what the data’s doing. If anything is going to be seen by other people (via paper, poster, presentation) I rework it in R or Excel.

  • D Davis
    May 19, 2008, 1:02 pm

    GoogleDoc’s Spreadsheet graphs are decent - and look MUCH better than Excel 2003 (though you loose the complexity Excel can do).

    Has anyone used any other online tools for analyzing data?

  • Michael Galloy
    May 19, 2008, 1:26 pm

    IDL, Python w/ VTK + matplotlib

  • Mike
    May 19, 2008, 1:36 pm

    I use JFreeChart quite a lot in my own applications. It does a decent job with time-series data.

  • Mark
    May 19, 2008, 2:07 pm

    IDL.

  • Shawn
    May 19, 2008, 2:53 pm

    Python and/or Processing. Then ActionScript when it’s time to make it interactive.

  • Sarah
    May 19, 2008, 8:53 pm

    Mathematica every step of the way

  • Jax
    May 19, 2008, 11:13 pm

    I usually use R, but I’ve been getting into Nodebox lately.

  • demaws
    May 20, 2008, 1:22 am

    Tableau

  • Jon Peltier
    May 20, 2008, 7:48 am

    @D Davis - You’re not using Excel’s defaults, are you. They are notoriously ugly, even in the reworked 2007 version. With a small amount of reformatting, Excel’s graphics aren’t half bad.

  • Michael Manti
    May 20, 2008, 9:41 am

    Stata.

  • Chrissie
    May 20, 2008, 10:31 am

    about your survey… you should be able to select more than one option / as in using check boxes rather than radio buttons…

  • Paul
    May 20, 2008, 9:19 pm

    Quantrix Modeller and/or Python

  • Tony2
    May 21, 2008, 2:15 pm

    Curious, where do you think that SVG sits in all this? Members on a mailing list mentioned that the iPhone might end up supporting SVG before it supports Flash.

  • Nathan
    May 27, 2008, 7:58 pm

    wow, there’s a lot of IDL going on. i don’t think i’ve ever even seen an IDL example. at least not that i know of. man, all of you use so many different software and languages. this looks to be a fun summer.

    @Angel: no need to be ashamed! use SAS with PRIDE.

    @Will: you must be an engineer.

    @Chrissie: that would be ideal, wouldn’t it :)

    @Tony2: i’m not sure, to be honest. i mean i haven’t seen a whole lot of impressive SVG stuff out there. also, i think it’s mostly for static stuff, right? i have a couple of old SVG books lying around somewhere, and it just came across as so…old. i could be wrong though.

  • Ramkumar KB
    Jun 10, 2008, 11:28 am

    Tableau, Tableau & Tableau…

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