![]() ![]() ![]() The visual discovery phase of the analysis workflow is the sexy part, but it’s not where most people spend most of their time. The self-service visual analytics approach is becoming mainstream. Tableau describes its products as offering “analytics that work the way you think” and says these tools harness “people’s natural ability to spot visual patterns quickly, revealing everyday opportunities and eureka moments alike.” There’s a certain amount of truth in that, although you could say almost the same thing about at least five other BI tools. In this review, I’ll give you a snapshot of Tableau as it now stands, drill in on features new since version 9, and explore the Tableau road map. In addition to new analytics, mapping, and data connection features, Tableau has added better support of enterprises and mobile devices in the last two years. Qlik is still a leader compared to the other 20 vendors in the sector, but trails both Tableau and Power BI. Automatic clustering is very interesting. Tableau helps identifying interesting patterns from the data by automatically generating clusters based of the groupings/categories specified by the user.Since I reviewed Tableau, Qlik Sense, and Microsoft Power BI in 2015, Tableau and Microsoft have solidified their leadership in the business intelligence (BI) market: Tableau with intuitive interactive exploration, Microsoft with low price and Office integration.This means you can download web-based JSON files and start to visualize them right away. JSON support. JSON is common file format for web based data, widely used for API-returned data.In addition, the just released Tableau 10.1 includes: And finally, a cleaner interface with new iconography, fonts and colors, sporting a cleaner, less cluttered look that I find much nicer.Custom Territories: Create custom areas in maps using the data built into the geocoding database.Cross-database joins: you can join different data sources within the program.A “highlighter” feature gives users added possibilities to sort, find and highlight specific data for ad hoc views and comparisons.You can set to your visualization to refresh automatically every day, if the underlying data in your Google Sheets file changes. Ability to connect to data stored in Google Sheets.Although far from perfect, it’s a big step forward in Tableau. You can now generate visualizations optimized for desktop, tablet, and mobile phones. Some of the new features in Tableau 10 include: You may prefer the Tableau Desktop version but it’s not cheap). The free version is a useful tool for individuals and organizations interested in making data public (remember that with Tableau Public you can’t save files locally, they are all saved to Tableau server and available for anyone to see and to download, including the datasets used. It’s used by thousands of corporations as a Business Intelligence/Analytics tool to visualize their data. Tableau is a powerful tool but also a great way of starting to think about key concepts in interactivity: about how to use filters, buttons, navigation tool tips or exploratory dashboards to let readers dive deep in your content. We actually use it for print graphics as well after saving files as PDFs. Tableau is a great exploratory tool that lets you quickly evaluate different options to visualize you data. We use Tableau during the workshop because it doesn’t require the coding skills necessary to use sophisticated tools such as D3.js, the tool behind many of those amazing interactives of The New York Times and others (although today you can code a nice data visualization in R, for example, with just a few lines of code). The newest version (Tableau 10) was released three months ago and has really nice improvements including a long overdue addition of device responsiveness to visualize data across multiple devices. Tableau is a great first step for those interested in data visualization online since it’s fairly easy to learn. Our Infographics and Data Visualization workshops always include spending a few hours using the free Tableau Publicsoftware to create interactive data visualizations with charts and maps on the web.
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