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Do you know a passionate Tableau evangelist? Is that person constantly seeking to help others visualize their data? Then that person is a potential Tableau Zen Master. Throughout July, we are seeking your nominations for the 2015-2016 Zen Masters.

As with many other social and political issues, data is a powerful tool for adding perspective. Here are several compelling vizzes from the Tableau community that show how this divisive issue has evolved over the years.

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.

How do you know your work is effective? And how can you improve it? One way is to emulate the 17th century coffeehouse patrons who led the age of Enlightenment.

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.

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.

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.