Martha Kang

How many people died of heart disease last year? Is child obesity on the rise? What’s the biggest health threat Americans face? The answers to these questions can help save lives by driving improvements in care and prevention. And thanks to open data initiatives, the public has access to the numbers that hold the answers. But that’s not enough, says Ramon Martinez, a health metrics adviser with the Pan American Health Organization.

With some help from his dad, 9-year-old Ben Radburn visualized the most thrilling roller coasters around the world. The dashboard, which includes a filter for the "drop(est!)” rides, is both impressive and endearing. But it’s only half the story.

The future of data is in the cloud. As options for cloud data emerge, we continue to add connections to them. We want to ensure Tableau customers can always work with all of their data. That's why we’re thrilled to share our plans to add a Google Cloud SQL connector to Tableau Online. Additionally, the Google Cloud SQL connector has been added to Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server as of today.

Hundreds of Tableau enthusiasts tuned in for the first European-led Tableau 9.0 Virtual User Group event earlier this month. We showed off the shiny new features of Tableau 9.0, which help data explorers stay in the flow of their work. Psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihaly calls this flow the secret to happiness, as Tableau’s own Andy Cotgreave explained during his keynote.

Alberto Cairo first began visualizing data in 1997, when there were few books on the subject. “And obviously we didn’t have social media to connect to each other, or even weblogs,” says Alberto, who teaches data visualization at the University of Miami. Alberto is delighted things have changed since. These days, data explorers have a trove of resources to turn to, including each other. In the spirit of community, he recommends these “little gems”—lesser-known worthy reads for data explorers.

If anyone could’ve imagined a thing like Tableau decades ago, it might’ve been Lee Wilkinson, Tableau's new vice president of statistics.

Hey, talk Tableau to me. No, really. This data viz by Jeff Shaffer and Allan Walker takes voice commands.

March Madness marks the end to what our sports analyst Dash Davidson calls the “sports purgatory that is the weeks following the Super Bowl." To bridge the gap, Davidson curated a series of sports-related vizzes over on Tableau Public, where the entire month of March was dedicated to sports. Here are a few highlights.

Thousands of Tableau enthusiasts joined us to celebrate the launch of Tableau 9.0 during our first-ever Virtual Tableau User Group event this week. The live feed from our Seattle headquarters reached Tableau User Group members across the world, many of them gathered at 25 local TUG viewing parties across the U.S. and Canada.