PC utilities forum: anyone recommend an interactive app for data analysis?

What you see in movies or TV? That doesn't really exist. Such is made for the TV and mostly photoshop'd and then a little custom code to make it look like it works like that.

I have seen folk forget what they are seeing is an illusion.
Bob

hi, datakeyword
Thank you for your suggestion, It's a good suggestion.
I had spend some time in R and ESPROC. This is my feedback.
R, It's a good analysis tools, free and has many documents, but It is for programmer. It is too hard for me, though I have some VBA experience in EXCEL. I think It maybe not a big problem, I hadn't tried my best.
ESPROC, It's another good analysis tools, especially for mass data. I learn It more faster, maybe because It has an Excel interface? I had never imagined there was such a tools. I think it is more easy to use and has the same ability as R or SPSS and so on. I'm using free version, It seemed enough now, though I got a warning every 15 mins.
anyway, thank you for your recommend. I should spend more time on ESPROC.
Can I ask you more question about ESPROC in the future?

hi, I meet a problem on ESPROC, and Can you give me a hand?

I want to know how to do a group, I mean I known there are three functions : group, align,enum. They seemes same, but what's the difference among them, and how to choose?

thank you for reply
I am afraid Excel is not a good choice because the data is updated daily in my case while Excel is fit for the fixed data.
As you mentioned, most data is stored in database. I tried SQL in the beginning but give up now because SQL does not provide the stepwise analysis capability like Excel.
For example, to solve these problems: a. to select out the 10 categories of best sellers b. as a further computation on the basis of result from a., to select out the top 20 products from each category, c. as a further comparison with that of the last year based on the result from a., to select out the newly-appeared and the disappeared categories on the list of this year.
If changing the SQL statement for the problem a to select out the 5 categories, then I'll have to change accordingly in the statements for b and the c. In addition, these SQL statements are too long and too complex. I've got hundreds of goals of computations like this.
As for the SPSS from IBM, thanks a lot for your recommendation, it seems powerful but too expensive and too professional to handle for me.
So maybe I am a bit picky or my case is a bit particular, from the above discussions, the Excel, SQL, and SPSS all might not be the perfect solutions. Is there any other recommendations?

I'd go and consider a real BI solution. For a start: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/B/Business_Intelligence.html

But all of these are more or less professional and more or less expensive tools, I'm afraid. For example:
http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/solutions-technologies/SQL-Server-2012-business-intelligence.aspx
http://www.sap.com/solutions/analytics/business-intelligence/index.epx
http://www.sas.com/technologies/dw/storage/mddb/

However, if it's your job to be a business analist or a data analist, or whatever it's called, you need professional tools, of course. I don't have any personal experience with these programs. But software like this is being used at the 100-million-dollar-a-year company I work for. But I can't recommend any smaller scale, simpler or open-source applications, just because I don't use them.

Kees

Kees

I'm willing to pay for the right one, including SPSS if it is useful.
I had check solutions you recommended and I dont' know how to make a clear dicision.
It seemes there are too many solutions.I think It's hard to image how to give a suggestion and make a choice without a discussible example.

So, I will give a discussible example below (with my friends's help, It's some difficult) ,please give me a suggestion about which solution is more fit for it, and how to use that solution to solve this problem( more details are ideal).

for example, I needs to compute the product whose annual sales values are all among the top 100
MSSQL data structure( sales table's fields): productID, time, value
SQL solution is as below:
---------------------------------------------------------
WITH sales1 AS (
SELECT productID, YEAR(time) AS year, SUM(value) AS value1
FROM sales
GROUP BY productID, YEAR(time)
)

SELECT productID
FROM (
SELECT productID
FROM (
SELECT productID,RANK() OVER(PARTITION BY year ORDER BY value1 DESC) rankorder
FROM sales1 ) T1
WHERE rankorder<=100) T2
GROUP BY productID
HAVING COUNT(*)=(SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT year ) FROM sales1)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This are very specific questions, so I'm afraid you can't solve them in any tool without write some code.

Personally (but that might be just a question of being accustomed to it) I would do this in MS Access (linked to the MS SQL database), because the GUI helps making the right queries.

Kees

thanks for your advice.
above problem must write some code, as what u had said. I just want to find a solution to write some clear code, easy to understand, easy to maintenance.
BTW, For Access, There are no like syntax "RANK OVER PARTITION BY". So that SQL statement is very hard to Access, and this doesn't include how to make a further analysis,I think it would be more hard.