Star ratings have become a staple for assessing review sentiment online. We see them all the time when we shop and can quickly associate whether a review is worth reading based on the 1 star vs 5 stars attached to the review. Given the popularity, I recently included star ratings by product in a dashboard designed for an executive audience. The visualization is intuitive and straight to the point. However, I started thinking why stars and not other shapes? To test out using other shapes, I kept it simple and fun. Star ratings, or in this case custom shape ratings

Business Intelligence as a field has gained rapid maturity over a period of time. We are living in an era when we constantly hear buzzwords like Big Data, Prescriptive Analytics and Data Science. In the midst of these catchy phrases, the one phrase that still stands out for me is Self-Service BI. Self-Service BI is defined as an approach that enables business users to access and work with corporate data even if they do not have a background in Business Intelligence. This approach is primarily intended to reduce dependency of business users on IT for creating their reports. In the