Using the inbuilt filters in Spotfire

Spotfire's inbuilt filters offer a very powerful and immediate way to start analyzing your data. Every time you add a data table to an analysis file, Spotfire creates a filter for each column. Just reflect on this for a minute: if we are going to try to filter or screen our data in some way, we have to do so on the basis of the values in one or more of the data table's categories. That is why a filter always corresponds to a table column and its values to whatever data currently populates that column through the rows, or records, in the table.

Let's take a look at the baseball data we loaded earlier in this chapter.

An important point to stress here is that we haven't removed any data from the underlying table. Our visualization—in this case, a basic table listing—has changed and lost some rows, but as you saw, when you reset the filtering, the visualization adjusted dynamically and displayed the refreshed results. We will cover additional aspects of filtering as the book progresses because it is central to the way Spotfire works.