Posts Tagged ‘software packages’

Using Mekko Charts to Show Market Share

Wednesday, November 21st, 2012

An extremely useful chart rarely used by market research professionals is a mekko chart, sometimes referred to as a marimekko chart.  It is a stacked bar chart, but (1) the width of the bars varies in a meaningful way and (2) they are lined up next to each other.  Usually the bars vary in width according to  market share.  This means that the surface area of the chart represents the total market, and each component of the chart is proportional to its share of the total market.

Here is an example: (more…)

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How to Make a Beautiful Market Share Chart

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

How do you make a beautiful, elegant, intuitive, and useful chart showing changes in market share over time?  In R.  That always seems to be the answer these days when it comes to data visualization as well as data analysis.  It is the reason that we at Versta Research are in the midst of an intensive course of training and retraining in R.  Here is just one beautiful example of what R can do. (more…)

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3 Reasons We Don’t Do Statistics in Excel

Thursday, December 1st, 2011

Over the last few years we have wondered whether spreadsheet software like Excel will soon make statistics software like SPSS or SAS obsolete.

Spreadsheets have amazingly powerful and often intuitive capabilities.  They have many of the statistical functions we use every day.  Younger people entering our profession rarely know programs like SPSS or SAS, and we see them turning to Excel to generate frequencies, calculate means and proportions, create charts from data, and so on.  The same goes for our customers.  Many do not have statistical software, so when they need numbers and statistics, they often work in Excel.

But Versta Research continues to invest in advanced statistical software rather than doing our work in Excel for three important reasons: (more…)

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