Product Reviews

Most spreadsheet programs include tools for turning data into graphs and charts to provide a quick visual representation of the numerical data. Sometimes, though, you may be dealing with particularly complicated sets of data, or simply with a spreadsheet so large that it can't easily be turned into a neat little pie chart.

Omniscope attempts to address this problem. The developers - a British company called Iokio - describe Omniscope as a visualisation tool that enables you to view your data in a number of different ways, making it easier to understand. You can import standard .xls and .csv files from both database and spreadsheet programs and display their data using a series of different views.

These views include the standard pie charts and graphs that you can create in Excel and any other spreadsheet, but some of the other views are more sophisticated. For example, a map view allows you to view the distribution of data geographically, such as the sales of a product in different regions, while a tree view displays information in hierarchical order, perhaps to show

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the personnel files of staff in terms of seniority or departmental structure. If a database file includes images such as photographs of products or staff members, you can display those with the rest of the data, making it less dry and abstract.

With Omniscope you can display multiple views of your data at the same time, so you could have a pie chart that gives a quick overview and a detailed table or chart that provides more extensive information. It also includes a number of filtering options that allow you to show or hide specific sets of data instantly, so you can spot trends or compare one subset of data easily with another. Once you have analysed your data you can share your findings with others, who can view your charts using the free Omniscope Viewer from Iokio's website.

Business or scientific users who regularly deal with large amounts of numerical data will find that Omniscope helps them make sense of it all. However, the program has one rather ironic weakness.

For a program that focuses on visualisation, Omniscope is not actually very attractive to look at. Many of the graphs and charts are presented as rather crude slabs of colour; there's little use of transparency or the graduated colours so beloved of PowerPoint presentations. The graphics are also resolutely two-dimensional, when even Excel provides some basic 3D graphs and charts. To be fair, though, Omniscope is not a presentation tool, and its real emphasis is on data analysis rather than eye-catching graphics.

Omniscope is also a little expensive. However, it could be a useful aid for anyone who's struggling to make sense of large amounts of data and statistics.