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Happy 2014! Hope your new year is off to a great start. Things are definitely great in the land of Tableau blogs. Here's the list of awesome content I've seen during the month of January. I'm filling in for Andy this month, you can always follow him on twitter (@acotgreave) if you want to hear about these posts the moment they are published.

A savings of $20 million. That was the immediate benefit of a Tableau dashboard created by ASM Research for the Army National Guard. Founded in 1975, ASM provides professional services and IT solutions for government organizations—and has worked with such clients as the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In this video, experts at ASM Research, including Data Analyst Scott Cochran, describe the recent project that saved the National Guard millions of dollars. Says Cochran, “that makes me feel great because it makes me feel like I’m helping reduce the national debt."

Usability Sciences specializes in user experience research. Founded in 1988, the company helps a diverse range of clients develop seamless experiences for their customers. And since its analysts began using Tableau, they’ve been gaining insights into online user experiences more quickly than ever before. We talked to Rebecca Ratliff, Director of Operations at Usability Sciences. In this video, she explains how Tableau helps Usability Sciences zoom in on the tiny details that cause visitors to leave a website.

As a major marketing company, Merkle is used to handling data from all kinds of sources. And with a number of big-name clients in multiple industries—including Dell, MTV, Susan G. Komen, and Bank of America—the marketing giant is regularly using Tableau with myriad data sources. “It’s actually spreading like wildfire across our entire organization,” says Senior Business Intelligence Analyst David Andrade about Tableau. In this interview, he explains why Merkle uses Tableau for both internal projects and client-facing communications.

For nearly 30 years, International Game Technology (IGT) has been designing and manufacturing computerized gaming equipment for clients around the world. Lon O’Donnell, IGT’s manager of professional services, knows the data-driven science behind casino gaming. In this interview, he explains how IGT is using Tableau to optimize slot machine features in ways that were previously unimaginable. “A single slot machine spits out six to ten fields per hour multiplied by a thousand machines multiplied by 24 hours, multiplied by 365 days,” O’Donnell emphasizes. “So you're looking at about a billion fields per year that a single casino will analyze.”

We love data visualisation competitions. Inspired by Facebook and Emily Kund's efforts, Mike Evans has created VizWars, a data visualisation event in Irvine, California, on February 11th. We recommend you go along and join him for VW1!

Welcome to the final 2013 Best of Tableau Web, looking back at December's blogging content. For those of you who aren't yet blogging, I hope they inspire you to start.

Working with Survey data is notoriously tricky. Different answer types, especially Likert scales, as well as free-form answers make the data dense. Now try to cut it by demographics and it gets even harder. For those reasons, many people who collect survey data fail to get the understanding of it that they hoped for. A new whitepaper by Steve Wexler offers a path to insight.

Allergan, a multi-specialty healthcare company with operations around the globe, employs more than 11,000 people worldwide. Joe Madigan is the Director of Customer Services in the EMEA region—Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. With so much ground to cover, he’s got a lot of data. In 2009, each of the 12 customer service sites in the EMEA region was using its own contact center technology—which caused data inefficiencies. In this interview, Madigan explains how his team went from 1 Tableau Desktop license to 20—and how that fostered a healthy environment for data and finances.

A highlight of tips, tricks, and inspiration for Tableau and data visualization.

In this 2nd in a series of posts about the upcoming 8.1 release, I get to introduce one of the most exciting new features in Tableau 8.1: R integration. R has been a very popular language among statisticians but in the past few years, it has become the language of choice for a much broader group of data enthusiasts.