Using Omniscope Views

Many different ways to display your data and related information on the web

Omniscope 2.4 currently offers 14 different views (version 2.5 has 17) to help you and recipients of your files analyse and illustrate the messages in your data. Omniscope views offer much more than just data visualisation and portable/exportable charting and presentation. Most views are complete data navigation environments enabling browsing, aggregation, analysis, filtering and drill-down to details. All views set to show the same data subset/named query e.g. 'Filtered data (IN)'  update simultaneously to reflect filtering actions.

Some views are slightly different:

Web View, opens browser window(s) showing linked web pages and the results of web services associated with the data set.

Content View (2.5+), displays free text comentary and links to web assets, including images and charts not referenced in the data set

Dial View (2.5+), creates typical dashboard-style gauges to display filed (column) composition, progress and alert conditions, etc.

Details View, displays all (non-hidden) values for each single record, together with images and buttons/links connecting to related web pages/services.

DataPlayer View, allows anyone to create interactive Flash DataPlayers encapsulating the data in exportable 'dashboards' for documents and web pages.

Adding Views

The vertical View Chooser drop-down menu appears whenever you click  on the Main Toolbar, or when you click on a view icon to change an open window from one view to another.  Each View is represented by its own icon:

For more on using each of the views, and the options available on their respective View: View Toolbar > View tools menus, see the Views Reference page, or click on the view icons above or the names below to go directly to the discussion of each individual views:

*To see these experimental views: Version 2.4: Tools > Advanced Tools > Application wide settings > Show experimental features;

Version 2.5: Settings > Application wide settings > Show experimental features;  (you will need to re-start your Omniscope for full effect).

Options for each view are generally available on the View Toolbar.  Many of the commands available from the View Toolbar > View Tools drop-down menu are common to all views. Commands or options common to all (or most) views are documented here: View Tools common commands.

View Toolbars

Each View has a View Toolbar, which presents the features and options applicable to that View, including a View Chooser, Data Sub-Set selector, Aggregation options,  a View tools drop-down menu, Fields (columns) picker and oterh options specific to each view. View Toolbars open and close at the top of each view window. All views and View Toolbars always open below the Main Toolbar, whose commands apply to all open views.

View Toolbars vary in appearance, since each View features different controls on the toolbar, but they typically look like this:

View chooser - switching or closing views

In the left corner of each View Toolbar is the View icon which identifies the view currently selected. Clicking this icon also reveals the vertical View Chooser drop-down from which you can change the view shown in that window.  On the right-most end of all View Toolbars is the Close View icon, shown as a black [X]. Click this icon to close the view. You can always bring closed views (or new, additional views) back by clicking this icon on the Main Toolbar:

Queries & Subsets selector - defining the data subset in each view

By default, new views will open with the Data Subset selector set to 'Filtered data (IN)' meaning you're looking at all the records that meet the filtering criteria expressed on the Side Bar. You can change the Query/Subset of the data shown in the view using the drop-down selector. More on Queries & Subsets

Aggregation menu - defining the aggregation of records in the view  

Beginning with version 2.4, many Views include an Aggregation drop-down menu, used to define aggregated views of the data, together with the function to be applied when aggregating each field (column). Aggregation differs from the presentational Grouping options available only in the Table View.  Unlike Grouping, the end user is not meant to 'unroll' or 'drill down' the defined aggregation to the lower level of granularity. User-interactive Grouping can be used in addition to Aggregation. For example, a file with each row defined as an observation for a given day can be aggregated by week, then grouped by month and year. In the resulting Table View, an end user would be able to unroll the groupings down to weeks, but to see the maximum granularity daily data, they would have to remove the Aggregation settings.

View Tools

Fields

Next section: Viewing Details