All Analyst Stories

One the many gems in this month’s roundup: a Tableau personality test! Put this test to the test by using the sliders to answer the questions, says Matt Francis, who created the test using a radar chart.

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.

The Tableau 9.1 feature I'm most excited about is the Web Data Connector. With this feature, any developer can write his or her own connector to a web data source and bring that data directly into Tableau. Many of our beta participants and Tableau team members have already written their own connectors with the Web Data Connector. These allow Tableau users to connect directly to sources like Facebook, Mapbox, and import.io for the first time. Tableau 9.1 will open many new possibilities for developers. To celebrate it all, we’d like to invite you to meet our developers.

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.

Tableau has long been known for its flexible front end and intuitive visual interface. But today, data scientists are increasingly taking advantage of Tableau’s powerful tools for advanced analytics and predictive modeling. Leveraging Tableau’s intuitive interface, you can complete sophisticated analytics projects in a fraction of the time.

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?

Here's a roundup of the best of the Tableau web for the month of June, including a Star Trek game made with Tableau, and a dashboard of a family tree.

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.

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.

The Tableau community produced a plethora of posts in May, from a commentary on how to approach viz building that provides great time and sanity saving insights, to a detailed comparison of Tableau Server performance on EC2.