All Business User Stories

We are excited to announce a new integration with NetSuite, a provider of cloud-based financials/ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites. We’ve added a new feature that exports NetSuite data as a .twbx file for easy analysis in Tableau.

How can women succeed in the data industry? For one, it’s important to push your own boundaries. That was the consensus at a recent SFBATUG meeting on the topic of Data + Women. Here are some takeaways from the discussion.

I am a huge fan of doing things the right way instead of using workarounds or shortcuts. Tableau is an incredible tool for solving problems, and using the functionality within Tableau, I have rarely found a problem unsolvable. That being said, sometimes it just makes more sense to make the data easier to work with before bringing it into Tableau.

Like any company, Tableau needs to make decisions about sales data. And as a data company, we’re always on the hunt for the best way to look at sales information. Here are five ways we look at our own operations to help make decisions about quota, territory management, and must-win deals.

For most of his career, Dave Story has been chasing the same idea: “making computers bring out the best in humans.” Dave is especially keen on using visual tools to augment the human brain. This fascination has taken him from Silicon Graphics (SGI) to Adobe, to Lucasfilm, to Tableau, with many stops in between. “They say two-thirds of the world is wired to think visually. I’m definitely one of those people,” Dave says.

I love podcasts. They’ve lightened my commutes to and from work for years. For people interested in data, now is a great time to be subscribing to podcasts as there are a growing number of fantastic podcasts. Here are the six podcasts I recommend to you all.

Moving data and analytics to the cloud can be a challenge. Given their variety, there’s no one-size-fit-all approach. Still, the immense benefits of the cloud outweigh those challenges, concluded a recent panel on cloud analytics at the Hotel Zetta in San Francisco.

Databases are populated with many large tables of tabular data, making them problematic to conceptualize. The ability to see and understand the data within a database easily is crucial to beginning any analysis. It turns out there are many database administrative tools that map out data models, but mapping hundreds of tables in a database tends to be a mess. Plus they are generally not available to the end users.

Two years ago, Vente-Exclusive found itself overwhelmed with data. It had billions of data points on customer behavior, email campaigns, and shipping logistics, but it had no way to gain timely insights. Vente-Exclusive found a solution in Google Cloud Platform, a family of products on a pay-as-you-go model. But it still had a missing link: how to present the data to business users who don’t have any SQL knowledge?

For social media marketers, the world is full of choices—often too many choices. Which hashtag should I use? When should I post that Facebook update? What’s the best tool for collecting data? Our social media team is constantly experimenting to see what’s possible with data. Not only do we analyze our own social media channels, we also use social data to explore broader conversations. Over the past year, we’ve pushed ourselves to ask deeper questions, especially about conversations on Twitter. Using data collected from Tableau partner DataSift, we’ve analyzed World Cup hashtags, SXSW session popularity, and journalists' use of Twitter during the UK general election.

What's the best way to compare two categories over time? We'll explore the options in this final post in our UK election series.

Often the raw values are not as important as the actual ranks. This is true in sports, politics, and any instance where final positioning is more important than the actual values. As with all chart types, showing the data in one way means a compromise. A bump chart hides the underlying raw values.