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by cpsempek 2813 days ago
Hi, thanks for the reply! Actually, apologies for throwing your name next to tableau like that. I think your product does a great job incorporating things like R/python scripting to allow more flexibility in how data can be manipulated within the product. In this sense I prefer periscope to tableau (an in many other senses actually).

A problem I encountered (granted over a year ago) was creating grouped bar charts with confidence intervals. Bars were grouped on some discrete x axis labels. The suggested solution for confidence intervals on grouped bars was to use a scatter plot to draw the confidence intervals, but this clumped them all on the xlabel position, not in the center of each bar. matplotlib for example treats the visualization as an object, in which case it makes a lot of sense that to add confidence intervals just query the bar objects for their positions and place line segments of desired widths in the center of the tops of the bars (or wherever, you have full control over this). So in general, a marriage of these two paradigms, quick development of a visualization based on data, but then the ability to switch to viewing and manipulating the visualization as a collection of instantiated objects with full control over their attributes.

I am open to revisiting over any development periscope has made to this end.

2 comments

Appreciate the feedback!

Yeah, the hack you described for CIs is typical of "80% charting". We have a list of probably thousands of longtail visualization requests and we're way past the 80/20 point.

These days customers who want to go 100% use the Python/R editors and do their custom visualization there. So you do your SQL query like usual, but then pipe it to Python/R for the visualization. Have you tried that, and has it worked for you? Or do you prefer another model?

Maybe try Muze to be able to build all those long tail viz :) - given that you don't have to think of any viz in Muze as a chart type - but rather compositions through layers. Would love to talk to you guys!
Always happy to talk! harry at periscopedata.com
Sending you an email tomorrow
offtopic: this is why I love HN! :)
If you don't mind, could you list the other things that make you prefer periscope to tableau? Also when you say R and python scripting, do you mean using them to prepare your data or to do something else?