Where does Observable fit in my organization?
Observable’s collaborative environment empowers teams to explore and visualize data, and then export visualizations to reports, data apps, or dashboards. Teams work faster and more effectively, driving actionable insights that power better decision making.
Our customers use Observable to define end-to-end data workflows and practices within their organizations, or to enhance and complement their existing tooling and workflows.
There are 3 primary ways in which Observable fits in a team’s data workflow.
End-to-end data workflows: exploration, transformation, visualization, communication
Observable notebooks give you controllable standards for your data workflow and more. After connecting to your organization’s data sources (databases or cloud files such as Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel), your entire data workflow happens in one single platform. Teams explore, transform, visualize and then communicate insights via reports, dashboards and data apps — all in the same place.
In addition, your data workspace templates are branded and purpose-built. Anyone on the team can get started working with data quickly with templates that reflect your brand and style guidelines. For example, if your org formats dates in a specific way, it’s reflected in your notebook. Templates even govern your organization’s adjustment logic. Observable notebooks can scale to serve as the source of truth for data-based decision making.
Rapid data prototyping
A common use case for Observable is prototyping. Notebooks are the perfect environment for the fast, team-based, exploratory analysis and initial visualizations required for rapid prototyping. You can import data from Snowflake, BigQuery, MSSQL, or another platform, and transform using ETL tools.
Once a prototype is validated, teams can build a production-ready version in their established dashboards and apps.
Embedding
Visualizations that are prototyped and built in Observable can then be embedded within external websites as dashboards or data apps that allow interactivity. The seamless collaboration allows different team members to contribute to building the desired output faster and with more trust and transparency. Embedding can be done as an entire notebook, or only specific notebook cells.
To read about how other companies are using Observable to get their data work done, please visit observablehq.com/customer-stories.
