jhincy
Recent Posts
Create report templates that contain charts, lists of locations, and summarized demographic data
This is the eighth blog in a series of blogs about what’s new in Business Analyst 10.1. In my previous blogs in this series, I have shown the basics of building your own reports with the Fusion Editor. Now let’s take … Continue reading
The new Fusion Report Designer, report creation made easy.
This is the fifth blog in a series of blogs about what’s new in Business Analyst 10.1.
In Business Analyst one of our major development focuses is to improve the user experience by making our software more user friendly. Another step in that direction is the new Fusion Report Designer where we have made some significant changes to the report creation process to make building custom reports easier and less time consuming. In an effort to ease the transition from previous versions of our report editor, we thought it best to show you the changes rather than make a long list of the improvements.
To illustrate this I created a short tutorial video.
What’s New in 10.1 – Create report templates that combine your own data with standard Business Analyst data
This is the fourth blog in a series of blogs about what’s new in Business Analyst 10.1.
In earlier version of Business Analyst, the creation of reports using your own data combined with standard Business Analyst data required you to build a single Business Analyst data set (BDS) using the Custom Data Setup wizard. In the new Fusion Report Designer, you can use two or more BDS layers to build a single report. This enables you to more quickly and easily build custom reports since we have removed the need to combine all your data into a single BDS layer from which the report will be built upon.
To illustrate this I created a short tutorial video.
Enjoy!
Blog Series – Importing and Using Your Own Data in Business Analyst – (3 of 6) Creating a Custom Report with Custom Data (Part B)
by Jeff Hincy
This is Part B of the third entry of a six part product team blog series that will walk you through importing your custom data and exposing it in multiple aspects of Business Analyst – such as maps, reports, analysis, and applications. The upcoming entries will highlight some great tips and tricks for all things Business Analyst customization. Check out the previous post here.
In Part A I focused on building a report utilizing the custom data created in a previous blog with Business Analyst Desktop. In Part B I will show you how to install the report report and run it.
Now that we have a custom report built the next step is to Continue reading
Blog Series – Importing and Using Your Own Data in Business Analyst – (3 of 6) Creating a Custom Report with Custom Data (Part A)
by Jeff Hincy
This is the third entry of a six part product team blog series that will walk you through importing your custom data and exposing it in multiple aspects of Business Analyst – such as maps, reports, analysis, and applications.The upcoming entries will highlight some great tips and tricks for all things Business Analyst customization. Check out the previous post here.
In this entry I will focus on building a report utilizing the custom data created in the first blog with Business Analyst desktop.
We have seen how to take custom data and transform it into a Business Analyst Datasource (BDS) and how to take that data and analyze it using the tools in Business Analyst Desktop to better understand and visualize the data. Now I am going to show you Continue reading
New report styles for Business Analyst 10
by Jeff Hincy
With the upcoming release of Business Analyst 10, I thought I would give you a sneak peak at the new report styles. We are revamping some of the existing templates, removing some of the redundant templates, and adding new ones. Here is what the new Demographic and Income report will look like (note: this is currently available on BAO with 2010 data).
This is page 1 and you can see the new header and footer styles are completely customizable and you can duplicate the style for your custom templates.
Here is page 2 with the new charts and graphs style.
Now you may be asking which ones will be removed and why. After installing Business Analyst Desktop, you will immediately notice that some reports are no longer available. These were removed to reduce redundant data and replaced with new, better designed reports that more efficiently cover all the data.
Here is a list of the reports that will no longer be shipped with the product.
- Age
- Comprehensive
- Comprehensive Trend
- General
- Household Summary
- Multi-Area Report
- Population
- Race Report
Jeff
Business Analyst workflow videos
by Jeff Hincy
The Business Analyst suite of products offer a vast variety of tools and reports that allow you dig deep into your current business model and better understand the potential of your business. Since Business Analyst is designed to appeal to large audience of clients sometimes the sheer number of tools and how they interconnect can be intimidating to some users. In order to help you better understand what our products can do for you we are going to be producing a series of videos targeting specific workflows. These workflows are just examples of some standard approaches that have been utilized with our products.
The data and names in the videos are all fictional and do not represent any real life businesses. Each of these workflows can be easily modified to fit your needs.
The first video is called Determine My Store(s) Trade Area. This video examines a single approach on how to analyze a stores potential by examining various trade areas. This analysis shows how with only store location data an analyst can quickly and easily determine the viability of a store.
The second video is called Determine the Lifestyles of My Customer. This video shows how to use Business Analyst to learn more about customers even when a customer list is not available. See how this fictitious hardware store learns what items to promote and how to promote them.
You can access these videos from the ArcGIS Resource Center and be sure to check back as we intend on adding new videos on topics such as Determine my Best and Worst Performing Store and Determine Market Penetration. These workflows are designed to be used with the current version of Business Analyst desktop and we will be updating them later this year when the newest version of Business Analyst is released.
Enjoy and I hope they become a valuable resource for you.
Jeff
Business Analyst Desktop 9.3.1 Service Pack 1 Released
by Jeff Hincy
In our continual effort to improve our clients’ experience with Business Analyst, last Friday we released the first service pack for Business Analyst Desktop 9.3.1 with 2009 data. This service pack contains fixes for everyone from client driven fixes, to a series of report fixes, and even an MSP style install.
Included in the service were the following improvements:
- MSP Style install allowing users to download an MSP from our Support Center or run it directly from the Update Utility in Business Analyst
- Approximately 179 bug fixes
- 19 client driven driven fixes
- Includes 2 previous hot fixes
- 53 report based fixes
- Bugs fixed for three international distributors with a follow up international specific service pack for localization coming soon.
If its been awhile since you have used our built in update utility let me refresh your memory. Close down all ArcGIS desktop applications and from the Start Menu select All Programs -> ArcGIS -> Business Analyst -> Check for Business Analyst Updates.
This will launch the Business Analyst Update utility and simply click the Check button.
The Business Analyst Update utility will check to see if you have latest service pack installed. If it detects that you do not have the latest service pack it will alert you that an update is available for download. Then just click the Download button and the service pack will be downloaded and it will automatically start the installation process for the service pack. Just follow the on screen instructions to complete the installation.
To verify that this service pack has been installed launch Business Analyst and from the Business Analyst menu select Preferences and then select the General tab and the current version of Business Analyst will be displayed at the bottom of this dialog. It will read Build#9.3.1.390.
You can visit our support site for a complete list of all the fixes. Additionally, if you are having troubles installing the service pack from the Business Analyst Update utility you can download the MSP directly from our support site to run the service pack locally.
Hey! I can see my house from here
by Jeff Hincy
Have you ever wondered how film makers get all that fancy imagery in their movies? You would assume it costs thousands of dollars and they have to jump through hoops to get it. Well you too can be a multi-million dollar film maker with the imagery that comes standard with Business Analyst Desktop.
Ok, well maybe that is not entirely true, but you can access some of the latest satellite and aerial imagery with the click of a few buttons. The ImageConnect toolbar in Business Analyst Desktop is a gateway to some of the best imagery in the business provided by DigitalGlobe.
Recently we have added a new dataset of imagery to Business Analyst through the ImageConnect toolbar. It provides our clients with the most up to date imagery that DigitalGlobe has to offer. It ranges from complete aerial coverage of the United States at up to 1 meter resolution to .3 meter satellite imagery taken from the QuickBird satellite that contains “deep strip coverage of urban, rural and coastal areas.” You can investigate a new market using imagery as recent as last quarter.
For those of you who have not explored this incredible resource yet, the ImageConnect toolbar is included with Business Analyst Desktop. It allows you to connect directly to the DigitalGlobe image server and download high resolution satellite and aerial imagery directly into your map and save them for later analysis and viewing. As long as you have internet access you have unlimited access to these images.
The imagery accessed from the ImageConnect toolbar contains not only the most current imagery but historical imagery that can be used to see things such as construction trends in a market. It is also important to note that before downloading your image you should examine the available imagery in your market to decide which attribute is the most important for your analysis. Sometimes vintage is the most important attribute but other times resolution can as or more important. By default the ImageConnect toolbar will select an image based on a combination of attributes such as resolution, data source, and vintage. To view a list of available imagery simply click the ImageConnect button and then select ImageConnect Data Library. From this dialog you will a list of the available imagery at your current map scale and you can select the appropriate image to download for your analysis.
You might be curious how to access this wonderful new data update. Let me show you how to access it.
Step 1: Launch Business Analyst.
Step 2: From the Main Menu you will see an ImageConnect menu option. Click the ImageConnect button and select ImageConnect Properties.
Step 3: From the Data Layers drop-down menu select Country Coverage and hit OK.
That’s it you are done. You will have to do this for each computer that Business Analyst is installed on and these preferences will be saved so you won’t have to go back and do this again.
-Jeff
Transitioning 2009 Business Analyst MXDs
by Jeff Hincy
With clients starting to receive their shipments of Esri Business Analyst with 2009 data I wanted to share some tips on how to transition any old MXDs built on previous versions of Business Analyst. Some users like to save a lot of different MXDs, as another way to organize their work or other good reasons.
Each year our team makes strides to improve the performance and usability of Business Analyst. Based on critical customer feedback and some changes made by the data providers, we completely overhauled the default Business Analyst MXD to provide an enhanced cartographic look and feel of our maps. While we were at it, we thought we would increase performance as well.
So, if you’re someone with a few (or a few dozen) ‘old’ MXDs lying around which could benefit from some fresh cartography and faster performance, read on. Note: a less-bloggy version of this is posted as a Knowledge Base article on our Support Site.
All you will need to do is remove the group layer associated with older versions of Business Analyst and add in the new group layer we have posted on our support site. I will detail the steps below.
If you have installed the new version of Business Analyst, the first thing you will notice when launching an older MXD is that many of the underlying basemap layers have red exclamation points ! next to them.
These red exclamation points indicate that the file locations where these layers were stored in previous versions on Business Analyst have been either removed or moved as part of our efforts to update and upgrade the MXD. Although it is possible to repair some of these data sources it is much quicker to simply remove the older Business Analyst group layer and replace it with our new one.
Here are the steps to update your map documents.
Make backups: Back up your MXDs before modifying them. Save any custom labeling or symbology associated with Business Analyst data layers to apply them to the new group layer if needed.
Step 1: Open up an ‘old’ MXD.
Step 2: Right mouse click on the appropriate Business Analyst group layer (typically either the Business Analyst Detailed Map or the Business Analyst Map group layer) and select Remove
Step 3: Download our updated 2009 Business Analyst group layer from our support site and save the group layer to the file directory recommended in the article.
Step 4: Go to File-Add Data or click the Add Data icon to navigate to the new group layer you just downloaded and add it to the map and you are done.
The updated map document will look something like this (excluding your specific layer files).
Note: We recommend that you do not mix data vintages (ie. 2008 and 2009) in your Business Analyst MXD as this may affect the tools dependant on these data layers.
Hopefully these tips will make transitioning older map documents much simpler.
-Jeff
