All Analyst Stories

Last week, we released a web data connector (WDC) to the Star Wars API. Judging from your Twitter conversations, we can tell there’s a lot of Star Wars excitement in the Tableau community! Today, we’d like to congratulate the fans (ourselves included) for enduring the long wait for Episode VII. We’re excited to share ten awesome visualizations about Star Wars, including many that you created with the WDC in just the past week.

Do you know an exceptional Tableau user who helps others via social media? Nominate the person to be a Tableau Ambassador! Earlier this year, we launched our Tableau Ambassador program, which recognizes community members who go above and beyond the call of duty to help other Tableau users. The program began with a single branch, the Tableau Ambassadors for the Community Forums. We soon added two more branches: the Tableau Ambassadors for User Groups and the Tableau Ambassadors for Social Media. The Ambassador program now encompasses three different—but deeply-connected—areas of the Tableau community: the community forums, the user groups, and social media.

Here at Tableau, we might be getting a little too excited about next week’s Star Wars release. But who can blame us? Star Wars basically has the perfect combination of brainy geekiness and excellent storytelling that we love here at Tableau.

Want more of your colleagues to dive into data? Introduce them to the data-informed way of life with an elegant dashboard about key metrics. A high-level dashboard that keeps the company updated at all levels and also drills down in seconds can help people evolve from passive consumers of data to self-service can-doers.

Today, we are excited to take another step in the cloud by extending our integration with Microsoft’s cloud platform with support for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines. This is an important part of the broad integration that Tableau offers with Microsoft technologies.

Did you catch the Ask Andy Anything About Data webinar? I talked with Andy Kirk (of visualisingdata.com) about the state of data visualization, appropriate chart choices, and the etiquette of critiquing others. It was great fun and we managed to tackle ten questions in the hour. We discussed a lot of different resources which are gathered here.

Oh, the poor, maligned pie chart. The chart type that gets pushed around and bullied on the data-viz playground more than any other.

Scatter plots are my favorite visualization type, hands down. From my very first interactive data graphic about The Great One to the most recent visualization below on major league pitchers, I’ve learned a great deal from these Cartesian classics over the years. In this post I’ll show you how to make them even better than the standard ones in Tableau.

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.

A dashboard is only effective if it answers useful questions for people. That’s why a customized, user-specific dashboard is more impactful than a ready-made, one-size-fit-all report. Here at Tableau, we always design visualizations with the user in mind. Here are several techniques we use to customize our sales dashboards.