Ellie Fields

In January, there were 42 Tableau User Group meetings around the world, and there are hundreds of active groups. The San Francisco group is one of the largest and most active, and I always have a good time when I go.

Update: We are excited to announce that Tableau 9.0 is now available. Many of you began receiving emails Friday night letting you know that the Tableau 9.0 beta is out. Several of the features in Tableau 9.0 were shown at the 2014 Tableau Conference. You can see the keynote presentation from TC14 here to get an idea of what’s coming out. There’s much more on the beta than we had time to show at the conference.

In this post, gentle reader, we give you no less than the future. Every year a number of us gather to discuss the state of analytics. What’s new, what’s innovative. Which concepts are emerging, and which promising approaches are finally becoming mainstream. While we can’t promise that we are 100% correct, we can promise an interesting read.

Over the last few years we've seen a huge shift in mobile analytical apps. Mobile analytics is transitioning from limited, standalone apps to analytics that work tightly with other systems.

In this video we take a look at how salespeople would use mobile analytics in the field to be more productive. The solution combines SalesforceOne, the mobile app for Salesforce, together with Salesforce Canvas and embedded dashboards from Tableau. We use Heroku Connect to enable real-time updates from Salesforce to the embedded dashboards.

It’s been great to see Salesforce embrace the idea of analytics for any business user at Dreamforce 2014. That’s the very idea that the entire company of Tableau was built on and something most of us here feel very strongly about. And we are passionate advocates of the cloud, which is why we launched our cloud analytics product Tableau Online over a year ago, and why Tableau is a big customer of Salesforce and other hosted solutions. We both help customers use sales analytics, and use them extensively ourselves. Here’s a view of Tableau analytics embedded in a SalesforceOne using Salesforce Canvas.

Why do Tableau and Salesforce go so well together? Salesforce is a great system for managing sales, marketing and service. At Tableau, we’re big Salesforce users. And all that sales, marketing and service activity in Salesforce generates a lot of data. That’s where Tableau comes in. Tableau can connect directly to Salesforce data and update it automatically on a schedule. Tableau Desktop lets you create sophisticated, interactive analyses with drag-and-drop ease. And you can embed those dashboards right back in Salesforce, to get data to people where they are doing their work.

"Many talks like this are loosely veiled pitches for books the speaker wants to sell you. This is no exception," said Dr. Neil DeGrasse Tyson as he began a tour of a variety of scientific topics. Thousands watched his keynote at Tableau Conference 2014, laughing and nodding and finally standing to applaud.

It's official-- Tableau Desktop is on the Mac! Tableau Desktop for the Mac has the look and feel you expect from a native Mac application. It even has support for high-resolution displays like the Mac Retina display. It's part of Tableau 8.2, the newest release of Tableau, which also includes a new way to tell stories with data and a raft of other features.

At Tableau we’re obsessed with data. Connecting to data, analyzing data, and communicating with data. Tableau 8.2 breaks new ground in communicating with data with the introduction of Story Points.