InspireData: Data Viewing/Graphing Application

Inspiration Software, Inc., 9400 SW Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy, Beaverton, OR 97005-3300, (800) 877-4292 www.inspiration.com. $79.00 with volume discounts for 5, 10, or 20 license packs. Free trial available.

By Chris Harris -- School Library Journal, 5/1/2007

From Inspiration Software, makers of the popular graphic organizer, comes InspireData. It’s a simple spreadsheet/database interface with configurable data fields that can then be displayed on a variety of different types of plots. At first glance, this is a confusing program. The 72-page “Getting Started” document should have been a tip-off. InspireData’s relevance in the media center is also a bit more subtle. I believe the product will be most useful as a reference resource, providing a wealth of data sets, covering topics as diverse as world population, baseball player salaries, hurricanes, and dinosaurs. Creating graphs from these data sets is a bit tricky, however.

Maybe if I had read the 72-page getting started guide I would have understood that in order to work with graphs, you must first define a field for an axis or grouping. You do this by selecting a field to display for each axis of a graph or section in a pie chart by picking a field name from a drop-down menu accessible through the axis title. Using this capability will reveal additional information hidden within the data sets that may not be visible in table view.

For example, there is not a very strong correlation between an NBA team’s win/loss percentage overall and their division standings; in other words a team can be doing poorly overall, but can still be winning key division games for a higher standing. Or, your InspireData plot may reveal something as meaningless and obvious as the inverse relationship between wins and losses in NBA teams, which shows that the more wins you have, the fewer losses you have. The trick is teasing out the meaningful comparisons.

For more complex comparisons, InspireData allows users to create custom Venn plots that show the “likeness” of two or more attributes using overlapping circles. Other available plots include pie charts and stack graphs that help show the frequency of data points through either a comparison against the total in a pie chart or a simple display in a stack graph. The table view uses tabs like a spreadsheet to allow multiple tables for each file. The program also provides rudimentary tools for creating a presentation from captured graphs.

In the end, this software is recommended, but be aware that training will be required before use.