What’s new in Polymer: April 2022
Workspace Redesign; Pivot Tables Moved to Insights Tab; More Clear Filtering Language; Column Setting Additions; More File Extension Options for Downloads; and Views Grouping by Visibility
Start making pivot tables in 2 clicks with Polymer!
Updated interactive tutorial here.
Pivot tables are a common tool for analyzing data, but most people find them annoying to set up in Excel. The interface can be counter-intuitive to beginners and the data quickly becomes messy when trying to analyze multiple variables at once.
It just takes 2 clicks to create a pivot table in Polymer. Here's how to do it:
Let's say this is our dataset:
And you wanna know:
Which city produces the most sales?
First, you'll need to sign up to Polymer and upload your dataset (instructions are here).
Once that is done, Polymer will use an AI to analyze your data and present you with a better-looking table:
Note: The data is interactive & shareable! This is a great way to show off to clients or stakeholders during presentations!
Next, input your variables into the 'smart pivot' section (located above the data):
As a rule of thumb, non-numeric values should go into the 'columns' section whilst numeric (number) values should go into 'metrics.' Sometimes this isn't the case though, for instance, 'age' could go into columns as well.
(You can ignore the middle column for now).
The data says:
The green/red number gives us context to the information which is important for larger datasets. Imagine if there were 50 cities instead of just 4!
Best part was we did all this within 2 clicks!
In the 'metrics' column, there are several calculations: SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT, MAX and MIN
What do those mean?
First of, notice how there are multiple entries for the city 'Boston:'
MOST calculations involve either SUM or AVERAGE.
With Polymer's Smart Pivot, you can perform ultra-complex analyses in a matter of clicks whilst it's near impossible to do the same in Excel (and extremely time-consuming).
Let's say we ran some Facebook ads and we wanna know: What are the highest converting ads across several demographics (gender, age, country and device type)?
This is an absolute nightmare to do in Excel, but for the Smart Pivot tool, you just need to input these variables into the 'columns' and 'values' section and we get our results:
The table bascially tells us the 'Europe' ad group has the highest conversions for people aged 18-25 who are female, living in Indonesia and using Desktop. This value is 4133.71% above average. However...
Take a look at the #COUNT# Column. This tells us our sample size. Only 5 people are from this demographic, so we can say this sample size is too small.
We should either increase it (by spending more on this ad group for these categories) OR by removing filters to get a larger sample size (e.g. we can remove the 'device' category).
There are three main advantages of using Polymer over Excel:
Polymer is a powerful tool for analyzing data and presenting it, however, it is NOT a tool for storing and editing data. There is no way to make edits to your data in Polymer - that has to be done in Excel.
Polymer is NOT a replacement for Excel. Instead, it acts as a super-easy, intelligent layer on top of your existing data and can save you hundreds of hours of analysis.
Pivot tables are just a very basic feature of Polymer. Where the real magic happens is in:
Now that you understand pivot tables, here are other things you might find useful: