Home Blog Bime 1.85: Data filters, Dynamic Count, Custom Display Formats [RELEASE]

Bime 1.85: Data filters, Dynamic Count, Custom Display Formats [RELEASE]

Posted by nicolas on May 25, 2010 in Blog, Releases | 2 comments

Bime 1.85 is out with a new great new feature set. The most important are data filters in dashboards. It is only available in the Enterprise Plan, but as with every release, we’ve made improvements to as much of the service as possible. Here is an overview of the best new features.

Data Filters in dashboard

Until now, you were only able to filter the data already present in the different visualizations of a dashboard. At base, they were visual filters that would reduce the size of each result by removing, for example, Product A & B from the results. While that in itself was already super useful, with 1.85 you get a new powerful feature in your toolset: data filter prompts. With data filter prompts you can slice the whole dashboard data even with attributes not present in the query results.

This feature gives you a whole new level of interactivity in your dashboards. The ability to examine data from multiple perspectives in a single place allows you to discover even more of the meaningful relationships that exist in your data. The good news is that analysts can pursue an unlimited set of questions directly from the dashboard, leading to comprehensive and free-flowing exploration.

Data Visualization guru Stephen Few writes: “Comparison is the fundamental activity of analysis. Something powerful happens when we are able to see data simultaneously from several perspectives. We are able to spot connections and discern relationships that would otherwise remain hidden. If we were to look at these same views of the data independently, one at a time, we would never gain the same insights, largely due to the limits of short-term memory. Once one of these views is no longer in front of our eyes, we remember little, if anything, of what we saw, so we cannot compare it to what we’re looking at now. We can hold about four chunks of information at one time in short-term memory. One of the best ways to work around this limitation is to place everything that you wish to compare within eye span.” Enter Bime’s Data Filter Prompt.

Here is an example of a dashboard that uses data filter prompts (on the right toolbox). User is “guest”, password is “guest”.

First tab in the right toolbox is data filter prompt. Second tab is visual filter.

How does it work?

When you create a dashboard (Pivot Table > Save to New Dashboard, “New” button in monitor) you now have three options:

1) Use query filters as prompts

This searches at every level in the pivot table filters dropbox in order to create prompts in the dashboard.

Example:

Query 1 from connection 1 has “Product” in the filters with no member selected.

Query 2 from connection 1 has “Product” in the filters with P1 member selected. Query 2 has also “Year” in the filter.

If one send these queries to a dashboard, we will get three prompts for data filtering: Product with nothing selected, Product with P1 selected, and Year. Changing these filters will affect only the original query of the prompt. A color legend is used to convey the link between the visualisation and the prompt.

2) Share filters between same connection queries

If option 2) is checked, filters from queries originating from a common connection will be mingled.

The same example as before will now give two prompts in the dashboard: “Product” with P1 selected by default and Year with nothing selected. Changing either of these prompts will modify query 1 & 2 in the dashboard.

3) Hide visual filter toolbox

Allows you to hide the original visual filter toolbox.

Note: you can modify these settings for an existing dashboard by choosing “Preferences” in the Dashbord menu (Monitor > blue arrow close to the dashboard name > Preferences).

Dynamic count

Sometimes, you just want to…count things. Every non-OLAP connection comes now with a new dynamic calculated measure called “Dynamic count” that allows you to count the number of rows in the orginal datasource that match your current query.

Custom display format

Until now, measure display formats were Bime ones. In this release, we’ve given you the ability to apply the display format of your choice: 2 digits precision, “,” as decimal separator, $ in the end etc…

We hope you’ll like this new release. Remember to use our support page to give us feedback and suggestions. Happy data analysis!

2 Comments

Mark
June 8, 2010

Bime is obviously still a Beta.

After several frustrating days trying to use Bime the conclusion is inescapable.

It's definitely still a beta release.

Here are some of my reasons.

1: Not all features are actually available yet.

2: It's incredibly slow.

3: It doesn't work half the time. Whether this is due to it being slow, or it simply hasn't been commercially tested, I don't know. The end result is the same, a very bug ladened experience.

4: There is no documentation.

How Bime expects people to actually use it with out supplying any sort of formal written documentation is a mystery.

5: Video help is badly implemented. What video help files there are, are badly designed. They move at breakneck speed glossing over many things that you really need to know. They are done by French people speaking English. And while the accent sounds delightful, it is often hard hear or understand what they are actually saying.

The help videos also seem to be designed for programmers and technical people, not business owners or marketers who could really benefit from something like Bime.

6: Bime is designed for Techs not business people. As alluded to above, the Help videos seem to assume some sort of prior knowledge of Bime or similar services.

Any business owner (large or small) trying to use Bime for the first time would probably give up in total frustration.

All of the above is unfortunate, as it appears Bime could be a very useful product.

It's just such a shame it's so hard to use.

Probably best to wait a year to see if Bime can turn itself into a commercial grade product.

At the moment it's definitely Beta grade, very early beta grade.

reply
- nicolas
  June 11, 2010
  
  Wow. It looks like you had a bad experience with Bime.
  Mark,
  
  Thank you for your feedback, even if it’s hard to hear. We obviously
  have areas to improve and we will certainly use your comments to help
  us.
  
  Nevertheless, I would like to address some of the issues you mention.
  Not necessarily to convince you, but at least to reflect our side of
  the story.
  
  Firstly, Bime is currently used successfully in production by dozens
  of companies.
  
  To answer your individual points:
  
  1: Not all features are actually available yet.
  I can’t see any feature missing. At least missing from what? One of
  the advantages of SaaS is that we are constantly adding new features.
  We will continue to do this ad infinitum, it is not that they are
  “missing.” Bime provides all of the features to access, analyse and
  present data, all of the extra features we release are additions to
  our core offering.
  
  2: It’s incredibly slow.
  This one is tough. Bime is able to tackle millions of rows, complex
  calculations, display charts with thousands of points… I would be
  really interested to understand which part of the application is slow.
  
  3: It doesn’t work half the time. Whether this is due to it being
  slow, or it simply hasn’t been commercially tested, I don’t know. The
  end result is the same, a very bug ladened experience.
  
  Bime has been commercially tested but we acknowledge that we have edge
  cases and we have tp rely on people like you taking the time to feed back to
  us whenever you find them. You have met one on your system (For our
  readers: we exchanged with Mark on our support forum but haven’t yet
  managed to fix his problem). Anyone (even billion dollar companies
  with thousands in their support teams) building software on multiple
  platforms meets these problems. Our baseline is simple: when we find a
  bug we dedicate our resources to fix it as quickly as possible.
  
  4: There is no documentation. :
  Our documentation is in development. We are actively building it and
  we should release the first support documentation in the coming weeks.
  To balance that, we offer free training for anyone interested. Two
  hours is all you need to know Bime inside out and I would be more than
  happy to spend the time with you. If after that,
  you have the same opinion about Bime then I’ll happily offer you 1
  year of Bime Entreprise Edition.
  
  5: Video help is badly implemented.
  idem as 4.
  
  6: Bime is designed for Techs not business people. As alluded to
  above, the help videos seem to assume some sort of prior knowledge of
  Bime or similar services.
  
  We acknowledge that we need to improve on the first user experience,
  especially for people unfamiliar with business intelligence at all.
  But if we take a broader view about what we are trying to achieve
  here: Bime is able to access any type of datasources from a web
  browser and provide a uniform interface to query those datasources,
  blurring completely the border between them. Some products on the
  market in similar space takes month to understand, here: 2 hours of
  free training and you have connections made,
  cubes ready to be queried and dashboards made with beautiful visualizations.
  
  We will do all we can to improve on the areas you highlight. Bad
  feedback is often more useful than good, so thank you for taking the
  time to provide it, Mark.
  
  I am here to convince you that Bime is a great product. With a short
  training session, I am sure I can.
  
  Kind regards
  Nicolas
  
  reply

Modern Interactive Data Analysis and Dashboards.

Bime 1.85: Data filters, Dynamic Count, Custom Display Formats [RELEASE]