Support: Tips for Using BizInt Smart Charts

Compare Columns

In Version 3.7 we introduced a new command on the Tools menu to compare two columns. This feature was developed in response to a customer's desire to see how Mechanism of Action values changed over time for an indication, but it can be used in many different applications.

Compare Columns looks for exact matches between the items in the cells in two columns. The order of items doesn't matter. The tool can report items which were added in the second column, or items which were present in the first but are missing in the second column.

The following table shows a simple example, comparing the value in Column 1 to the value in Column 2.

Column 1Column 2AddedSubtracted
B
C
D
d
E
B
d
E
C
D

E is clearly present in Column 2 but not in Column 1, so it appears in the Added set. However you might think that "d" should not be listed since "D" appears in Column 1, but the comparisons are exact so case matters.

Examples

For example, if you had search results from Thomson Innovation, you could compare the Derwent Patent Family with the Inpadoc Patent Family. The results would show you how the two families differed.

If you have extracted the highest phase for a particular indication (see the Cookbook of Reports and Visualizations for a recipe that walks you through the process), you can quickly create a column which shows the rows where the highest phase for the indication isn't the highest for all indications.

Or if you were about to update a company pipeline created from Adis R&D Insight, you could copy the Indications column to a new column "Indications Before" and then after the update compare the Indications column to Indications Before. This would let you quickly see new and discontinued indications. In addition to seeing changes in the drugs in development, this is an easy way to spot changes in indexing from the publisher.

Compare Columns also works with Reference Rows. So if your company pipeline above came from several different databases, you could use the Summarize Unique Values rule in Reference Rows on both the Indications and Indications Before column. The resulting Compare Columns operation will show the differences between the deduplicated lists of indications, before and after.

Using Compare Columns

Invoke the Compare Columns wizard from the Tools menu.

On the first panel, select the first column to compare.

The second panel lets you choose the column to be compared to the first column. You might notice that the list of columns is shorter on the second panel. Since we are performing an exact match between the values in the two columns, the columns must have the same number of sub-columns.

Finally on the third panel you choose what type of comparison you want to perform. You can show items added in Column 2, items subtracted in Column 2, or both at the same time.

On the third panel you can also provide titles for the columns where the results will be placed. Note that at this time, new columns will be created every time you run this tool.