Please watch the video in 1080p because it is recorded in High Resolution.
Please note the script of the presentation is below so you can read along with the demonstration if you like.
Hello and welcome!
Thank you for dropping by to watch our latest demonstration video for Meta5!
We are really pleased to see you drop by.
Thank You.
The purpose of today’s blog post is to show you the Meta5 desktop, and how it works.
The Meta5 desktop is the first feature you will notice when you log on.
And the Meta5 desktop is one of the features that makes Meta5 so special and so easy to use.
Most power data analysts, like you, spend 75% of your data analysis time collecting data, and 25% of your data analysis time actually doing data analysis.
For more than 30 years now, power data analysts consistently spend more time collecting data than actually analyzing it.
Meta5 switches those numbers around.
With Meta5, you will spend closer to 25% of your time collecting data, and 75% of your time analyzing it.
Meta5 makes the power data analyst, like you, around 3 times more productive.
Meta5 will make it possible for you to ask questions that you can’t ask today, without having to go back to IT and ask them for some of their programmer time.
With Meta5, you can perform almost any analysis you want, and produce any report or chart you want, without asking IT for programmer time.
All you need is access to the underlying data.
Now.
On to the demonstration!
Ok?
Firstly, your Meta5 desktop can be on your windows PC or on a server PC that you access with remote access software.
When you start Meta5 you get a splash screen with the logo.
Meta5 is accessed by a user id and password.
When you log in you are logging in to a secure environment with all the security features you would expect of enterprise software.
Only system administrators can see what is on your desktop.
So you can see in the top left hand corner there is a filing cabinet.
This is just like the filing cabinet you would find in your office.
This one is called New Icons, because this is where you go to get your new icons.
The function keys on your keyboard have the following meaning.
F 1 = Help.
F 2 = Move.
F 3 = Copy.
F 4 = Show Options.
F 5 = Delete.
These functions can be accessed using just the mouse.
This is done by pressing the left mouse button and holding it down, and then pressing the right mouse button.
A function pad will appear on the screen to provide access to the last four functions just mentioned.
In the new icons folder you can see a series of folders.
Of course, if you went to a filing cabinet in a real office, and opened the filing cabinet, and looked in a drawer, you would find folders with documents in them.
This metaphor for filing cabinets and folders was invented at Xerox Park.
Ralph Kimball brought the ideas to Metaphor Computer Systems.
Now we will look in to some of these folders.
The first folder is Blank Icons.
This is where you go to get a copy of the blank icons you want to work with.
There will be a lot of icons you don’t understand yet because you have never seen them before.
But some of them will make sense to you immediately.
Near the bottom of the list, there is a Text Icon.
This is the icon you copy when you want to write something in a text document.
Two icons above it you will see a spreadsheet icon.
Meta5 has it’s own spreadsheet tool, and this is the icon you copy when you want a new spreadsheet.
A little above there you can see a Query Icon.
This is the icon you copy to query a database using ODBC.
Above query you can see the Plot Icon.
This is the icon you use if you want to create a chart.
Today, we recommend all charting be done using Excel.
Further up, you can see an icon for an Email Envelope.
So once you have created a chart, or spreadsheet, or text document, or a query icon, or a capsule, you can put it in to a folder, and then put the folder in to the email envelope.
You can also see the Email Outbox.
Once you address the envelope, and put a message in the email envelope to explain the folder you have put in the envelope, you can email it to the people you want to receive it.
Meta5 can send email using the Meta5 email system, or you can send email using your company email system.
Just above the Email icons you can see the DBA Tool.
This is the icon that your data base people will use to give you a business users view of your data.
And the last icon I want to talk about here is the capsule icon.
This is the most important icon.
We will have separate videos about how the capsule icon is used.
Just from this portion of the demonstration, you can see that it is intuitively obvious what these icons are, and what they would be used for.
You can see a folder called Integrator Icons.
We won’t demonstrate them to you in this video.
These icons give us full integration to microsoft office.
The next folder I want to show you is the Transformer Icons.
Today you might have heard the term data wrangling as something new.
Well Meta5 has been doing that for nearly forty years.
These are the tools meta5 users do their data wrangling with.
You can get data from databases, spreadsheets, text files, web pages and more.
You can get data from where ever it exists.
Then you process that data through these data wrangling tools to deliver it to the internal spreadsheet to perform needed calculations.
And then you can send that data in to Excel.
You can send data in to excel using an excel region or table, or even in to the newer power query model.
Once you have sent the data from Meta5 in to Excel, you can use any Excel functions you like on the data, and present it in any way you like in Excel.
Meta5 can do a great deal of processing and calculations before you send the data in to Excel for reporting and charting.
Now, we are going to go through all the icons, but we are not going to explain what all of them do.
We will only explain what some of the main ones do.
Ok?
So let’s go.
The first folder is Aggregate and Combine Data.
For those of you listening to the audio only, the list of icons is as follows.
Append.
Concatenate.
Function.
Join.
Label.
Merge.
Multi Join.
Pivot.
Select Unique.
Subtotal.
The most important icons and most used icons are as follows.
One.
The Join icon.
This allows you to join data from two data streams based on the data in each of the data streams.
If you have some data in your data warehouse, and some other data in a spreadsheet that you need to join together?
You can do that with the join icon.
This is a very frequently used icon.
Two.
The Multi Join icon.
This allows you to join data from up to five data streams based on the data in each of the data streams.
So if you have 4 or 5 different pieces of data, all stored in different places, that you need to join together to perform some analysis?
Then you can do that with the multi join icon.
This is a very frequently used icon.
Three.
The Pivot icon.
This is like the Excel Pivot.
It allows you to pivot flat data in to headers and rows.
This is a very frequently used icon.
The next file drawer is the Convert Data file drawer.
The icons have meanings that are relatively obvious for most of the icons.
In the Convert Data icons we have the following icons.
Find and Replace.
Header.
Page Break.
Replace.
Sort.
Split Header.
Substitute.
Text to Spreadsheet, which helps us put text based data in to spreadsheets.
Transpose.
In the File and Utilities icons we have the following icons.
You would only need to know about these icons once you are building capsules.
Clear Contents.
Clear Files.
Clear PC Files.
Clear Transformer Files.
Copy Icon.
Random Number.
Rename Icon.
Set Colors.
Set DBA Access.
Word Count.
In the Filter Data icons we have the following icons.
They are commonly used when you want to adjust data as it flows through the data processing process.
Clean.
Column Select.
Compress.
Conditional Clean.
Multiple Select.
Multiple Split.
Row Clean.
Row Select.
In the Prepare SQL icons we have the following icons.
Data Format.
Date Format.
Period Table.
Save For.
Write SQL.
In the Regression and Time Series icons we have the following icons.
These are used for statistical analysis of data.
Auto Correlation.
Auto Regression.
Correlation.
Elementary.
Forecast.
Moving.
Regression.
Seasonality.
In the Significance and Sample Testing icons we have the following icons.
ANOVA.
Chi Square.
Cross tab.
I P Mean.
Kruskal.
KS Test.
NP Correlation.
NP Independent.
NP Paired.
So what you can see from this very long list, is that there are a lot of icons and tools in Meta5.
These icons enable you to process and manipulate data flowing through a Meta5 capsule in any way that you choose.
This means you can perform analysis of data to answer your questions to support the decision making process for your company.
To summarize the way that this works.
You come up with an idea to make some business change, or implement some business initiative, that has never been done before in your company.
You go to Meta5 to test the idea against the data you have available to see if that idea is viable.
You are asking the question.
“What are the chances of successfully implementing this idea in my company?”
If you come to the conclusion that the idea has merit, you can create a business case.
You present that business case to the appropriate level of management that is authorized to approve your business case.
It might take you a couple of cycles to get your business case approved.
If the business case gets approved?
Then you can use Meta5 to measure the planned figures for the business case against the actual figures for the business case.
That is how Meta5 supports the management decision making process.
It gives you access to all the data you have, and it gives you the tools you need to analyze that data to support your management decision making process.
And it gives you the ability to see how your new business initiatives turned out.
Meta5 is unique in giving you, the power data analyst, everything you need to support the management decision making process, without getting caught up in the IT backlog asking for IT programmer time.
To do this any other way takes multiple tools or requires IT programmer time.
You can easily see the value of investing just 2 dollars a day in to your new Meta5 desktop.
Now you can log off your Meta5 desktop.
Meta5.
The better way.
This concludes our demonstration of the Meta5 desktop, and the basic icons that are available to you.
We hope you liked this short demonstration video.
If you did like it, please hit the like button and please subscribe so that you will receive notifications when we release more videos.
Thank you very much for coming by our channel and watching our video, we really appreciate you.
I wish you a good day!
Thank you.
