Did you know that American Pharaoh, the first horse to win the grand slam of thoroughbred racing, was chosen early on as a once in a lifetime horse simply because of how large his left ventricle was?  Or that Walmart stocks up on Strawberry Frosted Pop Tarts before big storms, since they sell seven times faster during those times?  These are just two of the facts that I learned after reading Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s book ‘Everybody Lies’.

This past October, I attended TC17 where I had the chance to learn about Hyper, Tableau’s new in-memory data engine technology. Hyper enables a completely new level of analytical query processing for large and complex data sets. There has been a lot of excitement in the Tableau user community and so it was important for Veera to support Hyper right out of the gate.

As a long time user of Excel, what I love about Veera is its ability to make some of the more tedious Excel processes so much easier to accomplish. Here are six quick tips to help solve your Excel data troubles. 1. Make Merging Data Easier. Have you ever needed to join together data from two or more different but related spreadsheets? 

Today is Betty White’s 96th birthday. Pointing that out, I was challenged by a colleague, “Can you think of a data angle on this?” Why yes, yes I can.

Year-end is a time lots of lists are made and Google was right in the mix with their Year in Search 2017. The list shows us what we were all most interested in learning about last year. Topping the list are Hurricane Irma, the iPhone X and 8, Matt Lauer, and Meghan Markle.

This year, I set a goal for myself to read 24 books and, unlike some of those hard-to-reach New-Years resolutions, I stuck with it. So, I was thrilled when Goodreads emailed to ask me if I’d like to see my “year in review”- duh! Then it hit me that this is a perfect example of why descriptive statistics can be so fun (yes, I said fun).

My wife and I grew up in the Philadelphia/South Jersey area and relocated to New Hampshire in 1992. Since we both still have family “Down South”, we make trips around major holidays to visit them. 25 years of driving through one of the busiest traffic corridors in the US and we’ve become experts on the routes- how to get around Boston and NYC and when to leave so we miss rush hour traffic as well. When our kids were younger, we even knew where all of the McDonald’s Play Place stops were

Just like dating, predictive modeling is an iterative process. We sometimes have to go back and revise some of the steps that we took, or wipe the slate clean and start over. In order to prevent some of the common mistakes that come with predictive modeling, there are a couple of questions that we should ask our future x-variables before we decide to use them in our analysis.

I was recently working with a customer, Robin DePolo, of Mount Vernon Nazarene University. We were working on preparing some data for a predictive model, but the conversation shifted to all of the other (countless) things that she needs to get done before she can kick back and enjoy the holiday season. Sadly, Robin didn’t mean that she had lots of decorating, or shopping to do either- she meant required reporting.