Comma-Separated-Value (CSV) files are a very popular way to move data from one application to another, and nextanalytics provides three possible ways to load these files. Which method you choose depends on whether you have control over the file, and whether it has a header row with the field names for each column.

With Nextanalytics, we have taken a different approach to analytics. Our goal is to enable a junior or part-time business analyst to quickly provide insightful, ad-hoc information analysis to mainstream business managers.

You will not see a lot of statistic formulas or complicated concepts --  most business analysis relies on simple math; differences, growth, percentages, subtotals, average. When we do dip into a more advanced transformation such as a Frequency Distribution, we reduce it to a simple command (GetCountsOfValues) that most people will be able to understand.

This short document explains and demonstrates a popular example. This example shows you how to create a unix jsp page or aspx page that accepts user input for nextanalytics to modify the nextanalytics runtime processing.

After this step is complete, you, the customer, can choose from a variety of open source techniques to display or store the results (this is the subject of a different entry).

nextanalytics can leverage the number formatting capabilities of the Microsoft ASP.NET environment.

See how easily nextanalytics lets you split up a group of numbers into predefined 'buckets' so you can perform a custom distribution analysis.

Comparisons are easy with nextanalytics! In this example, you'll see how to compare numbers to the column average, and express the results as a percentage.

Simple colored alerting based on row, column or page averages can make different aspects of your data stand out. See how easily nextanalytics uncovers new information perspectives hidden in your reports.

In this first lesson, we start with an explanation of Nextanalytics scripting. It is fundamental to understanding the core advantages of using nextanalytics with your BI tools, charting packages and spreadsheets.

Scripts commands tell the analytic engine what to do but, more importantly, the scripts execute one line at a time such the results from one command automatically becomes the input to the next command. This simple approach to sequential data processing has tremendous advantages over query and formula based products. Since the script commands act on the current page, regardless of where it came from, they tend to be highly portable and easily be re-used with other sets of data.

We're going to show some basic operations that select data, sort it, and then filter it.

This command dynamically calculates a column summary value (in this example, the average) and then keeps or removes rows according to how they compare to it.

Sometimes you have to search and select rows based on a text attribute within the row. nextanalytics often uses this before or after an analytic command.

Although data can be obtained from many sources, it's rarely in the format that you need. With nextanalytics, it's easy to get what you want. Easy, dynamic generation of crosstabs from a wide variety of data sources is usually the first step toward understanding your data, especially if you're trying to develop good charting and visualization.