Why Tableau 7.0 Excites Me

I'm very excited that January brings with it the launch of Tableau 7.0. This is our seventh major release in as many years, with each release and each year being more exciting than the last. This release is the culmination of a bunch of hard work from our talented Development team, and is the next great step on our vision of helping people see and understand their data in ways they did not think possible.

Tableau 7.0 has features geared towards several classes of people. Individual analysts will enjoy new interactive functionality around parameters, new view types, and statistics. Groups and enterprises will quickly leverage new abilities to share data, manage larger deployments and scale to larger user communities.

However, there are a few features that I'm most excited about, and find myself using often as we prepare Tableau 7.0 for release. We have a new ways of looking at data that will allow you to better understand and visualize your data. Area charts can clearly show how metrics break down over time. Filled maps and easy geocoding give your data geographic context with just a few clicks. In grand Tableau tradition - these new views of data integrate with the rest of Tableau's functionality. View geographic shapes in a scatter plot to tell a different story, or wire up views with parameters to dynamically control bins or filtering. Of course, you can enjoy all of these capabilities on Desktop, a mobile client, or in a web browser.

The Data Server is a brand-new component of Tableau Server that is geared toward sharing data. You can publish your fast Data Engine-based extracts to Tableau Server and let other users leverage your data by connecting to it with Tableau Desktop. Publish several workbooks using this data to Tableau Server and keep them up to date with a single extract refresh. Or, publish a data source based on a relational database server that includes custom calculations, groups, and sets to provide a standard interface to data critical to your business. This takes sharing and collaboration around data to a new level across the enterprise, yet retains the ease of setup and use that individuals and smaller groups have always enjoyed.

And speaking of being enterprise-friendly, Tableau Server offers multi-tenant configurations, giving larger groups ways of organizing their Server into a set of self-contained subsets. Give independent groups at your organization their own site and allow them to fully manage their content without depending on a central administrator, all within a single Tableau Server instance.

This is just a taste of what has had us so excited at Tableau as 2011 drew to a close. Enjoy Tableau 7.0!

Andrew Beers
VP of Engineering