Introducing JMP Live
Daniel Valente and Jeff Perkinson, JMP
JMP has been at the forefront of statistical discovery for 30 years, giving scientists and engineers like you a much-needed tool for exploring data visually and interactively. At JMP we take great pride in your discoveries. We’ve made it our mission to empower anyone with a curious mind to explore and discover what’s in their data. The world has changed significantly since 1989 when JMP was launched. We’ve seen statistical methods and computing power evolve. And we’ve seen JMP evolve.
We've always valued discovery – especially when it comes as a result of playing with your data. That’s why JMP has advanced to meet your everyday challenges. We’ve always believed that discoveries are meant to be shared. That’s why we’ve exploited the bleeding-edge technological advances available at any given time to take JMP’s sharing functionality to the next level.
Over the years, our data exploration tools have become more sophisticated; and the way we share insights has matured too. Look at how far we’ve come.
- Copy/Paste - From the beginning, JMP followed the familiar paradigm of personal computing with copy/paste. You could select your results in JMP and past them into another application.
- Printing - In those days, paper was still a good way to share results. First in black and white, we printed with patterns to distinguish bars and areas in mosaic plots, and eventually printed in color.
- Journals - From version 1, JMP Journals were a great way to record your results. Rich with graphics and great for sharing, Journals were static. With the advent of Journals we could easily save in portable formats like RTF and Word, though these formats lack the excitement of interacting with your data.
- Scripting - JMP version 4 introduced JSL, and it was now possible to share JMP data tables with scripts attached. The beauty? Other JMP users could reproduce your results directly in their copy of JMP. This allowed us to extend and expand analyses. The downside? Your audience was limited to those people who had a copy of JMP.
- PowerPoint - As the world moved to standard presentation formats, we made it easy to save directly to PowerPoint. This was convenient, but formatting was an issue as everyone wants something different. Some people may want two graphs on a slide, others only want the tables. There was still much work to be done once you saved to PowerPoint.
- Flash - Let’s not forget Flash. In its heyday, it appeared that Flash would be a portable, interactive way to share animated results. We moved quickly to bring the most animated parts of JMP to Flash: The Profiler and Bubble Plots.
- Interactive HTML - As the web and browsers advanced, JavaScript and CSS made it possible to reproduce much of the interactivity of a single JMP report in interactive HTML. Selection and highlighting made emphasis and discovery possible, but this sharing method was limited in computational horsepower. We couldn’t reproduce the analytic capabilities of JMP itself in JavaScript or a web browser.
That’s the history of sharing methods and JMP, but as we all know, a graph will bring more meaning.
- Interactivity chart - Each sharing method has had its strengths and weaknesses. Let’s look at the various ways using these two scales. On the Y axis we have a scale of interactivity. How much power do we give our colleagues to answer questions for themselves from the data and graphics we share? On the X axis is a scale showing how large an audience we can reach. Are we limited by the technology to share with only a small set of people or can we reach many people?
- Sharing
- Copy/paste - This sits high on the audience scale, that is, we can reach many people by pasting into any application, but it’s very low on the interactivity scale.
- Saving scripts to the data table and passing the data table to others - To share an analysis you save the script to the data table and mail it to another JMP user. A saved script is very high on the interactivity scale: when you run it you have all the power that JMP gives you. However, this method requires JMP, so you're limited to only people who have JMP installed, so this method cannot reach a very large audience.
- Interactive HTML starts to get us there. High on the audience scale, anyone with a browser can look at results. But it’s relatively low on the interactivity scale. We can select points, but we can’t build all the power of JMP into a web browser.
- Beyond traditional sharing - In today’s world, there has to be a better way to gain more interactivity and share with a very broad audience. Today, sharing should be at the center of data exploration. You must be able to distribute your insights as soon as they emerge.
Enter JMP Live - Discovery, Delivered
With JMP Live, sharing becomes an integral part of your discovery process. Instead of waiting until your exploration and analysis are complete to share insights, you can share as you go. JMP Live reconceptualizes sharing. We’re moving from a paradigm of saving and exporting results to a paradigm where we proactively publish analyses along the way. This provides a more iterative, dynamic and inclusive path to showing your data and making discoveries.
With much of the interactivity of JMP through data filters and column switchers and recomputed analyses, reports in JMP Live allow anyone to look beyond your results and make discoveries for themselves.
Instead of sharing conclusions, you are sharing the vehicle for discovery. Indeed, JMP Live really is discovery, delivered.