JMP is a rich product with years of development. It's easy to get started in JMP but there are many features that can help make you more productive. I'll share 10 of my favorite tips with you here.
You'll find lots more information and tips in these posts also:
10 Things You Don't Know About JMP
10 More Things You Don't Know About JMP
10+ Things You Don’t Know About JMP® (EU 2018 424)
Plenary: John Sall on Secret Features of JMP
If you're looking for even more tips here are a few more great resources.
Shortcut and Modifier Keys
JMP has a great number of keyboard shortcuts and other helpful keyboard tricks.
Tools
There are many handy tools in the toolbar. You can switch between tools with a single keystroke, no modifier key needed :
A=Arrow, S=Selection, Z=Zoom, C=Crosshair, L=Lasso, B=Brush, H=Hand, R=Scroller, ?=Help, T=Text Annotate
Broadcasting Commands
Sometimes you want to perform the same action across similar parts of a JMP Report. You can broadcast commands with the Ctrl or Command key. For example, in the animation below, the Ctrl key is held down while choosing Means/Anova and when resizing the graph.
Dialog of red triangle options
If you want to choose multiple options from a red triangle menu, hold down the Alt key as you click the red triangle. You'll get a dialog box of all the options in that menu and can choose all that you want.
Finding the window you want
Here are three shortcuts to finding the window that you want and bringing it to the foreground:
- Ctrl-1 (Windows) or Command-2 (Mac) will bring the home window back to the foreground.
- Windows: Ctrl-Tab / Alt-Tab to cycle through JMP windows/all windows
- Windows: F9 - Reveal all JMP Windows
On Windows, F9 reveals all JMP windows.You can find these and many more keyboard short cuts on the Quick Reference card in the Help menu.
Get data from the Web with Internet Open
Sometimes you may come across a data table in a table on the web. If so, you can use File->Internet Open->Web Page... to import that data directly into a data table. This is really handy for pages like this table of S&P 500 companies on Wikipedia.
Extract values from character data using the Word() function
The Word() function is my Swiss Army knife when dealing with strings of text. The Word() function extracts the nth word from a character string according to the delimiters given. The default delimiter is space. If you include a third argument, any and all characters in that argument are taken to be delimiters. Read more: If you learn only one Formula Editor function, Word() is the one
Column Properties
The JMP data table is a rich storage format providing lots of metadata about the columns of the table. Much of that metadata comes in the form of Column Properties. Here are three useful properties to start with:
- Value Labels - Reformat values for display w/o changing underlying data
- Value Order - Change the order of values in graphs and charts
- Axis - Ensure that data is presented consistently in graphs
Use image files in graphs and elsewhere
You can drag and drop or copy and paste image files (jpeg, png, bmp, etc.) into graphic frames to put the image in the background of the graph. Perhaps you could use this to provide context for the data or insert a logo.
JMP also supports images in JSL. You'll find examples in Image Example JSL.
Layout Report Windows and create Dashboards
You can easily combine multiple reports into a single window and create dashboards. Choose Window->Combine Windows to get a dialog of open windows to choose from. You can arrange the windows on the screen the way you'd like to see them when combined.
Find rows in a data table using Select Matching Cells
In a data table you can select any cell (or cells) and right click to choose Select Matching Cells and all rows with the same value will be selected in the data table. This makes it easy to:
- count the number of rows with the same value - look in the lower left portion of the data table find the count of selected rows)
- create a subset with only certain values
- clean up data by selecting rows with bad values and deleting them
Add summary statistics to a data table
Sometimes it can be helpful to have summary statistics in a data table. Using the Summary table you can drag a column from the summary table back into the main table to have it auto-join and put the summary statistics with the right rows. The trick for dragging the column is to pause for just a moment after clicking before you start dragging.
Using Dates and Times in JMP
The best reference for using dates, times, datetimes, and durations is the blog post I wrote in JMPer Cable.
Here's the TL;DR version:
- JMP stores date and time values as the number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1904
- Dates are special case of datetime value where the time is set to midnight on the date
