JMP Essentials: An Illustrated Guide for New Users, Third Edition

JMP Essentials was written for the new user of JMP software who needs to get the best results right away. If you have data and problems to solve, JMP helps you make sense of them to gain understanding and arrive at a good decision. It is the goal of this book to help you with this task.

We often find new users of JMP simply trying to complete a specific task with their data. Perhaps you just need to generate a certain graph for a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation or to quickly see how patterns in your data will lead you to an important discovery. If these scenarios sound close to home, you have come to the right place. This book is task-oriented and will help you access your data, identify that graph or statistic you need, and quickly and easily create and share it with others.

JMP software is built around the workflow of the problem solver. One of its outstanding features is that it consistently provides the correct graphs and statistics for the data that you are working with (something we refer to as the JMP smart interface). JMP leads you down the path to the best result, provided your data is properly classified and you have an idea of what questions you are trying to answer.

JMP is easy to use. In most cases, generating a graph or result will take you seconds, maybe minutes, to complete but never hours or days. Much of this efficiency is due not only to the small number of steps required but to the ability to navigate intuitively toward the right solution quickly, rather than through repetitive and time-consuming trial-and-error. This book provides you with the essential knowledge to get to your solution even faster.

Though JMP contains state-of-the-art visualization and advanced statistical and data mining tools, we also believe it is the right tool for the user who might be less confident in his or her analytic abilities. While there is a time and place for every feature in JMP, we have tried to include only those topics that a typical new user—a manager, engineer or analyst, for example—would need. If it has been a while since you have studied statistics or dealt with its terminology, do not worry. We will present the key ideas and fill in the gaps as needed.

Audience

While this third edition of JMP Essentials is designed for new users, we have also focused on the most fundamental and commonly used features of JMP so that it may also serve as a valuable reference to the occasional user too. This focus is what we like to think of as the 20% of JMP that is used 80% of the time. Throughout the book, we have provided the necessary instruction to generate results quickly. Each key step in this process is illustrated with screenshots to help you see the result and develop your confidence in using JMP. We do not assume any formal background in statistics. Instead, we emphasize the intuition of concepts over statistical theory. If you require deeper statistical understanding, we recommend the documentation included in JMP and some excellent textbooks in the Bibliography.

Most new users of JMP have one or more of the following distinct needs:

1. They need to get their data into an appropriate and structured format so it may be effectively analyzed or visualized. (See Chapter 2).

2. They have a good idea of what graph they need and recognize it by its illustration or name and simply want to create it. (See Chapter 3.)

3. They really do not know what the data will say, and need help with exploring or with summarizing it. (See Chapter 4.)

4. They need to interpret or answer some specific questions about the data they have. (See Chapters 5 and 6.)

We also believe that the complete book is well suited as a reference guide to the following groups of users:

● Spreadsheet users who are looking for a convenient way to produce nice visualizations of their data or to supplement a spreadsheet’s statistical capabilities. JMP reads and writes data from a variety of programs including Microsoft Excel. This book provides a quick and easy way to make your spreadsheet data come alive and enables you to fully and interactively explore that data.

● Students enrolled in introductory statistics courses who may need JMP instruction. JMP is the ideal tool for students because its navigation reinforces the basic assumptions taught in an introductory course. This book provides an overview of the JMP tools needed in most first-year courses.

● SAS users who want to take advantage of JMP’s data visualization tools. We have provided Appendix A to illustrate the features of how JMP integrates with SAS.

Approach and Features

We have found that the best way to learn JMP is by using it and getting value out of it quickly. Our goal is to present the materials in this book in the most user-oriented approach possible. So, we have made every effort to organize the presentation around the new user’s common needs and questions and the most direct and concise means to answer them. We also recognize that the most basic use of data is in generating graphs of data rather than performing more complex statistical analyses. The following features are included for this purpose:

● We present the material with a show-and-tell approach. In most cases, we show you what the results look like alongside the conditions and steps required to produce them. We think this approach is especially useful for JMP users who have a good idea of what they want from JMP and just need the steps to create it.

● When appropriate, we provide an example-driven context for each JMP platform that explains its use, value, and general application to problems. We have tried to distill these contexts down to typical or easy-to-understand cases.

● We organize the contents into easily manageable chunks of information. While the entire book is designed to cover a fairly complete overview of the basics, each chapter represents one family of tasks (such as importing data, creating graphs, and sharing graphs).

● We hope you will keep this book near your computer. Within each chapter, we have designed each section to be self-contained enabling you to quickly find and execute the steps required to complete your task.

● No matter what your professional background, this book assumes only that you have a basic working knowledge of Microsoft Windows. Virtually all of the information in this book applies to using JMP on the Macintosh operating system, but only the Windows version of JMP is used in the examples.