Launching Spotfire Analyst

Spotfire Analyst is a rich desktop client and can be launched like any other Windows application. There are usually two shortcuts to Spotfire once it's installed. The first is as follows:

The other is as follows:

The first shortcut is the one you will use the most often. The (show login dialog) shortcut is useful if you've previously asked Spotfire to remember your server details and login information and you want to update these for any reason. By clicking on Manage servers..., you will be able to select which server to connect to (or, potentially, work offline, by selecting the corresponding option at the bottom-left of the page):

When you launch the Spotfire client, you will be presented with a home page that has shortcuts to various frequently used features, such as loading recently used analyses, loading recently used data, or looking at sample Spotfire files. This is the Files and Data... view, which can be shown or hidden by pressing the + sign on the top-left of the page. This page is the starting point for connecting to data and analyses, whether this be on the local system or in the Spotfire library:

Feel free to explore some of the sample analysis files. I hope they inspire you to see what you can do with visualizations in Spotfire. Of course, you can always use the search box—it's really useful for finding files or connections to databases, and so on.

If you're interested, view the sample video! The link opens a YouTube video—while you're there, there are lots of other Spotfire videos that you can browse. Many of them cover some advanced topics, but hopefully they will inspire you to learn more and you'll come back repeatedly as there is always new content being published.