Thursday, November 17, 2011

Tableau Software: Amazing Tool for Data Analysis and Viewing

I downloaded the free trial of a new software called Tableau yesterday. It is one slick tool - you use your excel sheet as the data source and connect Tableau to it. Once done, you can quickly slice, dice and view your data in more ways that you imagine. I was pretty impressed. It costs a thousand bucks, so I am not sure if I'll make the jump yet, but I am a sucker for these kinds of things. Here is what I put together in under 10 minutes - a tool that shows My U.S. Portfolio performance relative to Vanguard's S&P500 index fund. You can use the slider to move the reference start date and then click on the points on the two line charts to get cumulative performance from the reference date.


2 comments:

  1. Hey Risha,

    $1,000 is a lot, but there's a free version of Tableau with a few limits:
    + 100,000 rows of data or less
    + Can only use data from Excel or CSV
    + Your data will be available to the public

    Tableau Public: http://public.tableausoftware.com

    Full disclosure: I'm an engineer at Tableau and your blog popped up in my Google Alert. I did look around, however. I'm starting to get into more active investing, and your VIC plug convinced me that membership in the club is a valuable goal to have

    I'm burning through Intelligent Investor right now. Any other resources you recommend?

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  2. Matt,

    Thanks for pointing out the public version of Tableau. I think the free version will work for my needs.

    I highly recommend the following steps:
    (1) Learn the language of business i.e. accounting
    (2) Read Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman, and the two books by Joel Greenblatt
    (3) Next, become a guest member of VIC
    (4) Start reading up write-ups from the past that have a 5.0 or higher rating
    (5) Start doing it

    All the best
    -Rishi

    ReplyDelete