And we're back! With another installment of OMNI APPS—IN ACTION, which I have to say is almost as awesome of a title as my toddler's favorite DVD on the face of this earth, HORSES—CLOSE UP AND VERY PERSONAL.
(Spoiler alert! The movie features horses.)
This week we've got a really interesting OmniGraphSketcher use case to share with you, thanks to Troy Payne, a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati. He's working on a grant for the Ohio Office of Criminal Justice Services, and is currently offering data analysis and problem solving services at no cost to small and medium-sized Ohio police departments. He writes,
One suburban police jurisdiction thought they had a huge increase in robbery in 2009. They asked for our help to determine why. When the research team dug into the problem, we found that there wasn't an increase at all, on average. A handful of 2009 months were higher compared to 2008, which probably accounts for the perception of an increase. But the overall trend was not one of explosive increases.
Troy's team worked on different ways to visualize this information, beginning with a basic OmniGraphSketcher line chart that plotted raw counts for each year for which they had data (2006-2009) by month:
He goes on to explain,
That line chart is difficult to interpret because there isn't a clear trend line. Frankly, it's a confusing mess, with each year overlapping all the others. This is very common with crime counts, particularly in small jurisdictions where the counts are low. Here, the monthly robbery counts are in the single digits and are highly volatile.
We needed to simplify this chart or our message would get lost.
OmniGraphSketcher to the rescue!
We decided to create an area that was ±1 standard deviation from the 2006-2008 average for each month and plot the 2009 robbery counts against that. While not a true confidence interval in the statistical sense - because we're plotting the standard deviation instead of the standard error - this does provide a cleaner visualization of how "typical" 2009 robbery counts are:
The take home message: Robbery was pretty much where we'd expect in 2009. There was not a large increase in robbery.
Hooray for robbery not increasing, right? Hooray for data visualization!
Want to know how Troy created that chart? You're in luck, because he was nice enough to tell us:
I have a spreadsheet in Excel that has the crime counts by month for each year. I created columns for the average and standard deviation, then created columns for the average ±1 standard deviation.
Then I had to get the result into OmniGraphSketcher. For me, the easiest way to do this was to copy/paste one series (i.e., column) of data at a time. I started with the low end of the shaded area. I hid the columns B-E in Excel, selected the month and mean-1s columns, hit command-c, switched to OGS, hit command-v. Then, in the OmniGraphSketcher inspector, I clicked the connect points button. Next, I repeated that process with the mean+1s column, making the upper bound of the shaded area.
The shaded area itself was created using the fill tool in OmniGraphSketcher, which is delightfully simple to use. It just works.
It's taken me *far* longer to describe what we did than to actually do it in OmniGraphSketcher. And that's the power of the app. I can quickly create stunningly beautiful charts that convey the ideas I need to convey. Instead of focusing on how to fiddle with the software, I can focus on how my message should best be transmitted to my audience.
Aw, man. We love happy customers SO MUCH. Thank you, Troy!
While everyone else in this office goes completely insane working to meet iPad deadlines (seriously, one of our engineers put in something like 20 straight hours of code commits yesterday, which, well, I'm not saying one of our products will for SURE have a weird feature involving a Dali painting and a flurry of Pig Latin, I'm saying it's a POSSIBILITY), I thought I'd share the first of an ongoing series of blog posts unofficially titled OMNI APPS—IN ACTION.
You have to imagine the IN ACTION part with jazz hands, okay? Otherwise the whole title thing just sounds kind of stupid, like something I made up like two seconds ago while drinking a third Red Bull. Ha ha! As if.
Anyway, the idea here is just to share some stories of how people are using our software, which will hopefully provide a little inspiration and maybe even teach you something cool you didn't already know.
We're going to start with Paul Zagaeski, a technology analyst and marketer who relies on OmniOutliner in his job. Not sure how an outline can help you in your work? Read what Paul has to say:
An outliner app has been my most frequently used writing tool since I bought my first computer in 1983. I've always been a words-type thinker (rather than a visual or picture thinker), so I'm drawn to tools that help me organize words fast and efficiently. I can't recall any writing project I've ever tackled that didn't start with some kind of outline.
An outliner helps me keep a sense of control over both the process of writing, and all the content as I research and write draft text. Dave Dunham described outlining as being similar to building a ship: keel, framework, planks, deck, masts are assembled in a connected structure. Writing is starting with an idea or problem, adding questions or main issues to cover, doing research to address the issues, doing analysis and comparison on the facts from the research, deciding what it means, deciding what to say as a conclusion. If writing fiction, it's the same process only using plot points, characters, scenes, dialogue. The key thing I learned about writing is that you don't go from A to Z, stopping at every letter in turn. It's always a jumbled process of adding ideas, gathering bits of information, drafting actual text, and reorganizing, while jumping from one part of the project to another as needed. If I didn't have a writing tool that let me add, move, collapse, expand, sort, number, list, and stick in odd bits of things like pictures and links, it would take me much longer to do half as much.
Paul is currently using OmniOutliner to complete a pair of technology business reports for the site GigaOm Pro. These reports cover the market for digital paid content and the technologies that allow users to quickly and easily pay for things online or on mobile devices. Here's how OmniOutliner is making his job easier:
I used Outliner as my research tool to collect articles and other online content, to record phone interviews and then transcribe the good stuff, and to write notes and comments to myself on what I thought of the material and how I might use it.
Then I used Outliner to create a full outline of the report with headings and key words. I started drafting the sections, starting with company profiles and working backward to describe the market dynamics and business drivers. I pasted in links to the articles I wanted the reader to click through to get more information about a particular company, event, technology, or another writer's point of view. I also pasted in images and graphics I wanted to use in the report. I moved sections around until I thought the report flowed logically from topic area to topic area. Then I exported the whole thing to .RTF and imported it into Microsoft Word for revisions, more writing, and formatting. The document was supposed to be 30 pages, and I found I had written 80+ pages in Outliner! Eventually I divided the report into two documents and they'll be published separately.
Paul says his only challenge with using Outliner was having to apply MS Word styles to each paragraph after importing into Word (but that's because he can't run Office 2008 on his older Powerbook—OmniOutliner Pro can export outline style information that's picked up by the latest version of Word). The biggest benefits: being able to quickly collapse the report and get a good sense of the flow of topics, being able to focus on single sections at a time to write and rewrite them, and being able to record his phone interviews right on his Mac and then transcribe them so he could get all the facts straight.
Thank you, Paul, for letting us share some of the details behind your OmniOutliner workflow. You can read more from Paul at his blog, find him on LinkedIn, or follow him on Twitter.
Do you have an Omni App (in ACTION) story of how you're using our software? Let me know in the comments or via email, I'd love to hear it.