First Launch (New User Welcome Kit Series– Video 1)
Covering: JMP windows, File options under Top Menu Bar, Home Menu, JMP Starter, user-interface basics, Help Tab, mentioning JMP Community, Using Sample Data, Books, and other help items the Statistic Index
Narration Script
Congratulations on being a new JMP user, I’m here to make your first launch smooth, point you in the right direction to tackle your data and help you achieve a solid JMP foundation. We have a series of the new user videos and this video is intended for those that are giving JMP their first launch. Let’s get cranking.
Our sample data files used in these new user video series are available from the Help tab in JMP or linked below at jmp.com. In this video we’ll be using the hot dog data under the food and nutrition sample data. Again sample data is available in JMP under the Help menu on your top right.
First, you should have JMP installed and running on your Mac or Windows machine. If you need help with that install…watch an installing JMP video and then return back…
When new users are freely exploring JMP, we tend to open or create many unrelated windows, like graphs and data tables. Getting a grasp on what’s it’s currently going on and what files are open in a JMP session is a best practice and it’s what will cover first.
When we first launch JMP, the home window appears...it’s a portal that keeps JMP items straight and organized. Once you know that this window exists, you can rely on it as a heads up display of JMP activity. Our recent files are available over here on the left…and the current open files are on the right. You can also drag your favorite files to the far left.
I find it helpful to start from a clean slate as I work on new projects. You can also clear your recent history to remove un-related files you’re no longer working on.. by selecting, clear recent items under the settings icon. But, don’t worry there still stored on your computer or network, there just not shown here on the JMP home menu. You can close the home menu at anytime and bring it back up under the Windows tab with all that information saved. There’s also a quick key listed here depending on your operating system you. So take note of that. (Show Window/Mac Quick Key Graphic)
For a solid JMP foundation and an efficient workflow it’s important to understand the File tab under the top menu bar. Here under File>New …we can create new files…or windows like data tables, scripts, organizational presentation tools like JMP journals, and even make some time saving Add-Ins …so you can share your genius with your colleagues. (Show all new windows we can create in a grid)
We can also open files, export, and even connect to a Database.
There’s a lot going on under the File tab.
You may wonder where the Import option is? Well, all files, like Excel sheets, are accessed by using the Open command.
As an important side note as of JMP 11, make sure your Excel files are saved with the .xls extension not the .xlsx or when you go to open it will greyed out. You can also copy and paste data into JMP. I do that a lot to save time.
Many of these same File items are also conventionally located in the JMP Starter menu. Using this JMP Starter menu is a really personal choice but has been designed to save time by packaging some critical commands. I find it to be helpful if you’re using dual screens by positioning the JMP Starter window on my second screen. It’s also a good tool to explore what JMP can do.
If you’re ready to Analyze your data and you don’t have to have a Data table open, buttons like Distribution in the JMP Starter or equally under Analyze>Distribution in the top menu will ask you to open a data table because there’s nothing to Analyze, makes sense, right. But if we have a Data Table open.. it will offer that information in the Distribution setting window. If we have multiple Data Tables open it will pull data from the last selected Data table. Now if you’d like to apply this, pause this video, launch JMP, and try opening two sample data sets and perform a Distribution on each and saving a least one of the distributions. When saving, it will prompt you to embed the data set go ahead and do that
If you were successful, great, but let’s quickly review that process. We’ll open up the sample Data under Help, on the top menu,… over here under Data Sets categorized by data type…,we’ll select hot dogs., that will open, we’ll then select candy bars. With the candy bars Data Table selected we’ll use the.. JMP Starter menu and select Basic on the left list, then select Distribute. Here in the distribution window we’ll drag over the ounces to Y and select OK under the Action commands…. So Congratulations, we’ve analyzed some data and created a Distribution. Now let’s do this another way.
Going back to our Home menu, we’ll select the Hot Dogs data set and this time will do the same distribution but access it from the top menu under Analyze then Distribution. Once there our Hot Dog data set is available on the right we’ll drag over Calories and then select OK.
Awesome. We just created two Distributions with two different Data Tables by accessing Analyze from the JMP Starter menu and the top Menu bar. Both do the same but for new users it’s important to understand that there can be multiple ways to accomplish things in JMP. Personally, If I’m using one computer screen, like my laptop, I tend to utilize the upper menu bar.
I also love the fact JMP progressively offers us options that make sense from where we’re at in our workflow. That’s an important concept to understand as we learn more about JMP and how menu items will appear depending on what specific data we have or what we’re trying to Graph.
JMP itself is actually a great instructor; it has a strong Help system with Search functionality, links to books and our active JMP Community, Tutorials, and Stat definitions. We don’t need to use those right now, but I wanted to illustrate one tool on how JMP can help you learn more just by the way it’s designed.
Let’s navigate to the Help tab, drop down to Statistic Index (I think of this as a Stat Library focused on JMP), go over here in the list, hit the letter m on your keyboard…look for Median…select that,… and notice over here how it provides Median’s definition and even enables us to run that Distribution, if we had a table open …. I think that’s cool that JMP let’s us apply that Stat formula immediately.
For the first week of using JMP visit something new in the Help menu every time you sit down with your Data.
We now know how to hide and close windows leaving critical Data Tables open, run a simply distribution under Analyze, we can use the JMP Starter menu or the top File tab and we know how to retrieve all your files from Home menu so we can focus our time using JMP to discover answers in our Data.
Next in the New User series we’ll cover Data Prep. We'll learn how to get Data in JMP, prep it, classify it, clean it up, organize, and combine and then export data.
Thanks for joining and using JMP.
