Choose the project named "Actuals.txt". You should be seeing a screen that looks like the first picture. This project simply loads some sample data from a file.

This demo would work with any data, it doesn't even need to be a crosstab, nor does it need to be a data file. It could easily have been a SQL query. Once it is loaded into nextanalytics, it doesn't matter where it came from.

Standard deviation is a good way of deciding what's an outlier and what's not. So, I'm going to convert all these numbers into the number of standard deviations.

1. Click the Normalize menu
2. Choose Standard Deviations
3. Confirm it says it will go down the column
4. Press OK

The program has automatically calculated the column average, and the standard deviation unit for each column. Then it re-wrote the crosstab to show the number of standard deviations from the average.

Now the cells show the outliers. Cells that were below average now have a negative sign. The key point is: The farther a number is from zero, the more of an outlier it is.

The ease of doing this operation is a big step in analytics but it's not far enough. I need to see trends. I need to do one more step.

Let's group outliers with the same value together. Get the bad with the bad, and the good with the good. All relative to the individual column average and standard deviation unit for that column.

1. Choose Normalize Menu
2. Select Swap Cell Values Row Labels

Now we see similar Outliers grouped together.

The negative outliers are in the first row.

The positive outliers are in the last row.