Exploring the DEA’s Pain Pill Database in ArcGIS Insights
ArcGIS Insights was a little bit more challenging than I had anticipated! I believed it would be fairly easy to use after being drawn in by its ability to generate beautiful visualizations by simply dragging and dropping information into our dashboard – dashboards had personally been one of the more frustrating and tedious components of the introductory course and I was excited to have this alternative. In this regard, Insights excels: the maps, along other charts and visualizations, are easy to generate, easy to customize, and easy to refine. The ease with which we could generate a linked diagram, for example, far outshines the process we would need to go through in ArcGIS Pro. The options for customization may not be as extensive as those in ArcGIS Pro, but that level of granularity is not often needed in one’s day-to-day work. In some ways, Insights felt like a more streamlined version of Tableau, where the focus was predominantly on explanatory data analysis (one could use it for more exploratory purposes, but the functionality is not geared towards that approach).
Where Insights falls short is around data analysis. It was tremendously difficult to complete the part of the tutorial when we enriched and analyzed the data – while Pro can be finicky, it does have useful, clear error messages to guide me through the process. This does not exist in Insights – when I incorrectly geocoded the addresses during my first pass at the exercise, it did not notify me that there was a mistake with my input, rather it told me that some of the addresses could not be captured, but allowed me to continue with my analysis (leading to the generation of several very unusual looking maps). While I appreciated the relative ease and range of options given to me in Insights, I did not feel as prepared to run queries or conduct any in-depth analysis (and, more importantly, I missed being able to just use Python!).
I would definitely use Insights again as a visualization tool – it’s fairly easy to use if I just need to quickly generate tables, charts, and maps for a presentation or another similar purpose. However, I think I will import information after I’ve had the opportunity to process and analyze it elsewhere first.
My slides comparing ArcGIS Pro to ArcGIS Insights can be found here!