topic Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet in Discussions

JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

Mark_Bailey — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 13:59:29 GMT

It seems to me that a lot of requests appear in these discussions because users attempt to solve a problem or use JMP like a spreadsheet. The rows and columns in a JMP data table resemble a spreadsheet but this appearance is misleading. My intention here is to discuss ways of using JMP, interactively or scripted, that will be rewarding instead of frustrating. I hope that others will join this discussion. Maybe we can reduce the level of frustration in the future that arises from attempts to use JMP in a way that it was not intended.

First of all, a spreadsheet is oriented around a cell. A cell is a location in which to store a value or a formula. It accepts formats. It can be organized with other cells in rows and columns. It is easy to work with rows, columns, or a selection of cells, but they are still individual cells. I can put anything anywhere at any time. That behavior is convenient when working in software that is optimized for consolidating and reporting financial data. JMP, on the other hand, is software for discovery about and between variables using myriad statistical analyses and visualizations. It is oriented around the variable. A data column is a cohesive collection of values for each variable. These related values share the same meaning and, therefore, the same format and other meta-data. A row is also a cohesive collection of values that represent an observation and share row states.

Second, the data table is primarily for storing and organizing data (variables and observations) along with their meta-data. It is not responsible for any kind of analysis. The numerical and graphical analyses happen in the many specialized platforms available through the Analyze and Graph menus. The platforms work with the data table and data filters (change row states). Multiple platforms may be simultaneously opened on the same data set. Multiple platforms maybe combined into a single window when this enhances the analysis.

How else is JMP not a spreadsheet? I will be back with more ideas but it is now your turn.

No software can claim to be all things to all users. I would not expect a word processor to be good at functional data analysis nor would I expect it to be easy to teach it to do so. Many different kinds of software easily and successfully work and play together today so that we may use each of them to their best advantage.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

Thomas1 — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 14:37:40 GMT

I fully agree. I suspect that most new JMP users have basisc or bettter than basic Excel knowledge.

Therefore, in my experience, it would be important to point out the fundamental differences between JMP and Excel as soon as possible.

This would make it possible to get positive results more quickly with JMP.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

P_Bartell — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 14:39:51 GMT

Great thread @Mark_Bailey . Whenever I introduced JMP to new users I had a simple admonition that I hammered home to those in attendance. It went something like this:

There are three rules for learning JMP:

1. JMP is not Excel.

2. JMP Is Not Excel.

3. JMP IS NOT EXCEL.

Then invariably later on in the session somebody would ask the question, "How do I do 'x' like I can in Excel?" If it wasn't doable or wise in JMP, I'd refer to the three rules to remind everyone that JMP is not Excel.

On a more serious note, I thing a key difference between JMP and spreadsheet applications is the point and click, dynamic interactivity that permeates JMP and is virtually nonexistent in spreadsheet applications. JMP is designed for what I call 'nonlinear discovery'...where the user has the opportunity to move in a sequential fashion through their data and analysis posing certain questions, learning by doing, all in the context of an analysis flow. Compare and contrast this to the what I'll call the 'once and done' of a spread sheet app. Want a bar chart? Make one. Want a pie chart? Make one. etc. But that's as far as you can go. Then it's back to square one to start over. Not so in JMP.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

Thomas1 — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 20:03:32 GMT

Imaging the following. As an experienced user of JMP, you have to switch back to Excel. The main question would be, how can I do this in Excel, what I have done before in JMP.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

vince_faller — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 14:52:19 GMT

The first thing I teach people when they're first learning JMP is using by columns with stacked data. I find this to be a good seed to show people the difference between excel and JMP.

@Mark_Bailey I think it would be great to keep this post (or a summarized post of other people's suggestions) as a sticky on this forum. This is something I find hard to get through to people who haven't really used JMP before.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

Jeff_Perkinson — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 15:15:37 GMT

@vince_faller wrote:

I think it would be great to keep this post (or a summarized post of other people's suggestions) as a sticky on this forum. This is something I find hard to get through to people who haven't really used JMP before.

Done. We'll keep it up there for awhile.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

txnelson — Tue, 25 Jun 2019 15:50:58 GMT

Excel users think in terms of having to build everything they need. Because of this, they tend to use Formula Columns to generate their stats and Graph Builder to display the results. Learning that JMP Platforms can make their lives easier is a very eye opening thing for the Excel user.

Speaking of Formula Columns, another eye opening event, is the fact that JMP Formula's don't have to fit on just one line. And they can be long and complex if needed. Several times, new Excel to JMP users have remarked that they never new that more than one statement can be used in a JMP formula.

Another "Wow that's Powerful" item, is the exposure to Excel users on how you do a Vlookup in JMP using Join/Update. The simplicty of the Join/Update platforms compared to Vlookup makes JMP a real winner.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

martindemel — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 16:29:33 GMT

When I'm talking to people about the difference of spreadsheets and JMP (or JMP tables) I refer to the following - besides what has been said already:

One of the big advantages in JMP is that you do not have to necessarily know upfront what you will find/have at the end. You can explore your data fast and interactive and find new clues, related variables or patterns you might never have thought of. However this also requires to be open for a different mindset! You are allowed to think yourself, using standards as guidelines instead of fixed rules (as Gerrman I know what I'm talking about :D ).

Of course there is some change in how to approach an analysis, but when you managed this change the adoption of new platforms is very easy. And the best - JMP offers a huge amount of training for free via STIPS E-Learning, on-demand webcasts, tutorials in the learning library, live-webcasts, the community with all the contributors (a big thumbs up to all of you!) blogs, discussions, and discovery summit presentations, youtube channel, ... Not to forget the technical staff which is in contact with the JMP users spread all over the world.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

gzmorgan0 — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 19:57:48 GMT

@Mark_Bailey

I am not sure if this is what you are seeking, but here are a few comments.

When I teach an introductory JMP class some of the key ponts I make include:

The JMP data table is similar to a database table:
- Each column is a field. A column called Employee ID # only contains ID numbers. You should not have a column of weights that also includes the mean and min and max and std dev of weights in the same column.
- Each column has a data type. This enables JMP to do calculations on the rows(observations) extremely fast because it checks the data type once for the column, unlike Excel that must check the data type for each cell before a calculation.
- A formula is applied to the entire column. There are methods to make it selective (more advanced).
- Excel is great for displaying data and not very efficient for analyses on large data tables. JMP does not have the fancy cell formatting and simple pull down filter. (see last bullet)
Then a short demo showing how graphs and tables are linked (that is brushing), excluding, auto recalc, redo and saving a script quickly highlights the benefits.
Filtering by columns is quite different in JMP. Another demo showing filtering (Row Filters, summary tables and source tables are linked), then subsets and "by" analyses. By analyses and Summary using complex By usually gets "oohs and ahs" as does split and stack.

Then another key point is to introduce stacked tables great for By analyses (Anova) vs. unstacked used for modeling and correlation. This fits the rubric of organizing or data prep for analyses.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

MannyUy — Fri, 28 Jun 2019 13:20:55 GMT

No, the JMP table is much more than a spreadsheet. However, there are much more Excel users than there are JMP users. So I very often have to convert my JMP data tables, or even JMP DOE tables, into Excel so that they can be used by my many non-JMP user colleagues. Unfortunate but true.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

PatrickGiuliano — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 23:25:20 GMT

Use jmp.com/learn. 
Follow some of the expert JMP users who work at SAS, they give wonderful introductory webinars which help the user understand and interact with their data -- @Chuck Boiler once told me that the learning curve for JMP is short and steep.  I'm not so sure but I do know that "curiosity is the engine of the mind," as Ken Robinson put it.  Gradually use the tools and see how they can really enhance your work!  
 
First lesson I wish someone would have told me, I learned from 's webinars, which is: Click that little square divided into two triangles in the upper left hand corner of your data table! I can't tell you how that has changed my experience with ease of "manual manipulation" of my JMP data tables in a pseudo-MS Excel-like way!   Those little triangular areas are your friend, they will de-select everything for you with just a few clicks when you get confused by JMPs "non Excel like" row/column selection pattern (which ends up being wildy useful later on).    
Second one is Right Click > "Select Matching Cells".  Those of us who use this on a daily basis understand the power of it! 

  
 
 
 
 

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

lwx228 — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 07:21:05 GMT

I use JMP as a database that can be computed directly.
Its sql-like statements are too powerful.
JSL is very powerful and very flexible.I have always insisted on using JSL to operate JMP.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

dlifke — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 16:55:26 GMT

Thanks for the post Mark. When I teach an Intro to JMP class I refer students to the Discovering JMP book that comes with JMP Help>Books>Discovering JMP and I point them to page 63, How is JMP Different from Excel? That seems to be very helpful to students.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

mdawson69 — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 19:38:05 GMT

I do not know if I can add much more to what has already been stated here, but here goes.

At my insistence, my employer purchased JMP so that I could perform the type(s) of analysis required for and by our most demanding client. While most government contracts are gray, this particular client wanted to go deeper than “what would happen if we implemented this?”¹ Or, as he put it, he wanted his study “to have a methodology and results that were defensible.” That meant following a statistical process: design of experiments, a data collection plan based on the DoE, modeling and analysis of the data, and inferencing the results from statistical analysis.

Prior to our acquisition of JMP, everything was performed in Excel. Depending on who was processing the data the workbooks that were created ran anywhere from mediocre to why. Despite the large user base, Excel is still at its core a powerful accounting ledger, so what our management incorrectly deemed to be statistical analysis was nothing more than summary analysis.² Proving this particular client’s need was not going to happen in Excel.

When we acquired a JMP license, my first thought was that a data table looks very similar to a spreadsheet, but I quickly found and realized that where Excel and other spreadsheet software typically have the cell as the base object; that is, each of the 6,871,947,674 cells is independent having no relation to any other cell unless otherwise defined by the user. As I had prior experience in SAS, it became rapidly apparent that a data table is a data model in waiting. As others have noted, columns serve as either independent variables (predictors) or dependent variables (responses), while the rows in a JMP data table are observations.

JMP’s paradigm prevents users from engaging in some of the more atrocious way in which people use Excel; such as putting multiple “tables” on a single worksheet instead of being treated as independent objects that should occupy their own worksheet. Excel while seemingly having a broad range of graphs, pales in comparison to the Graph Builder platform.

The various platforms offered in JMP have no equivalent in Excel outside of perhaps third-party add-ins. For people inexperienced with statistics, the Analysis ToolPak add-in that included, but not pre-installed in Excel reinforces the misconception that there is not much to performing statistics. Want to design an experiment? Can you employ various techniques to determine if a data set is from a normally distributed population? Need to perform analysis on non-parametric data? Do you want to perform pairwise analysis to determine the factors in your model that are significantly different? If you are using Excel, forget about addressing such needs.

Recently, a co-worker an I showed the president of the company how he could quickly explore data in JMP. The Distribution platform alone sold him, as he saw that with little effort he could rapidly see how data was distributed with histograms and box plots, as well as get quantiles and summary statistics. The capabilities of Graph Builder blew his mind. Our president later asked me if JMP can perform SQL queries, t which I answered, “Yes.” I provided him with the built-in PDF books included with JMP where he how to perform such queries.

Simply put, true data discovery and statistical analtysis software, such as JMP, are far better suited to analytics than the kludges that are applied in Excel. Excel is not designed to perform much beyond reporting summary statistics and basic graphs.

¹ It is often the case that government contracts are posed by non-technical persons at the management level. More often than not, the contractor needs to guide their client to a solid, and achievable, objective given the biding price and contract period of performance.
² One of the major issues data analysts and data scientists face is getting their supervisors and clients to realize that the generation of descriptive (summary) statistics is not the application of statistics, or more properly, statical science and data analytics that leads to statistical inference.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

statman — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 22:38:19 GMT

I also stumbled on to this thread and thank the previous responders for some great ideas. I offer my humble experiences. I do two things in my professional life:

1. I teach experimental design and sampling as means to gather data (and regression when there is no data collection plan) and a host of procedures to analyze the data. I follow my own guidance in the analysis of data: Practical, Graphical and lastly quantitative.

2. I analyze data sets form clients (these can take many forms).

I make a point that ~95% of my data analysis time is spent organizing the data into a structure/order so the data can be analyzed correctly. All questions that can be answered, conclusions that can be made, confidence in extrapolating the results, etc. are DEPENDENT on how the data was acquired (context).

All of my clients use Excel. I gave up on some emphatic DON"T USE THAT POS (piece of software). Software is a language. Many individuals speak Excel fluently and they are comfortable with it. JMP is a different language. Learning a new language can be terrifying and frustrating. Excel has its good points and its issues. Its good points include how extremely flexible it is, that is, of course, one of its bad points. I state ALL statistical analysis software requires discipline in its use (yes this includes dare I say Minitab...yikes). Over the course of working with my clients, it becomes clear the incredible capability of JMP. I demonstrate how organizing the data wrong leads to erroneous analysis. They naturally become convinced it is in their best interest to recognize how JMP performs analysis. I have not found one "event" to be the convincing argument, but repetition. Once they see this (admittedly it takes many reps), they now can use Excel with the knowledge of how it will need to be organized in JMP to perform the correct analysis.

Cheers,

Bill

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

P_Bartell — Sat, 21 Sep 2019 14:34:32 GMT

A recent JMP Discussions reply from @Mark_Bailey regarding the KS test interpretation illustrates another differentiating global feature in JMP compared to your garden variety spreadsheet application. Interactive/online Help. If one is curious about a specific analysis platform report element and want to learn more, you don't have to hunt/peck/guess by keyword or table of contents search to learn more. All you need to do is go to the JMP main menu bar, select Tools -> Help, then hover your cursor over the element you want to learn more about and click on the element. You'll go directly to the most relevant content in the JMP documentation. Easy peasy.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

notoriousapp — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 17:58:50 GMT

Great input! Many of us that have been using JMP for years will quickly dismiss anyone proclaiming that they use Excel and it works fine. This would be the moment to help this temporarily captive audience understand the value of using JMP vs Excel (or any other tool that they use as a hammer). I'd love to see JMP publish a series of articles highlighting why one would consider moving their work from Excel to JMP. To JMP users, this is an obvious transition when JMP is required or provides other advantages (efficiency, reproducibility, etc.), to non-JMP users, they don't know what they don't know.

If you're looking for a good example of this, take a look at business-science.io. They do a great job of documenting a case study of how moving their work from Excel to R gave them a 10-100X productivity boost: https://www.business-science.io/business/2019/02/20/excel-to-r-part-1.html

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

KarenC — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 21:34:42 GMT

https://www.jmp.com/support/help/en/15.0/?os=mac&source=application#page/jmp/how-is-jmp-different-from-excel.shtml

Updated in 15 to help you get going in JMP if you are more familiar with a spreadsheet than an analysis tool.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

Paul_J — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 16:33:56 GMT

To me, before we address technical differences (such as cells vs. variables), we have to keep in mind that there are "billions-and-billions" of spreadsheets out there created by "millions-and-millions" of long time users.

That is, Excel is an engrained Culture*, while JMP is ... ?

Any thoughts or experiences on how we address the Excel culture when promoting JMP?

* that comes automatically with Office software suites.

Re: JMP is Not a Spreadsheet

PatrickGiuliano — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 22:49:49 GMT

You have to demonstrate the value-add from a business perspective. The value is in time-saved in doing the analytics, not only doing the analytics faster, but far more powerfully (and easily). Start with graph builder. This platform alone is so incredibly powerful and really becomes easy to use after some patience and fortitude - it's drag and drop. JMP.com/learn is a great place to start. Short 5 minute videos are clear and precise to get the user base going. Seeing is beleiving. Visual analytics are the beginning and the end of every good data analysis.

Excel doesn't have this functionality. You can become a "pivot-table" expert with a few short tutorials in JMP in less than 10 minutes. You can become a "graphing" expert with just a few short tutorials in JMP in less than 10 minutes. With Excel it's much harder to get there, especially for the average user. And often the average user has the most direct insight into problems (from the hands-on perspective).