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

This is the first in a series of blog posts on the Tableau 8.1 release. With every release we try to provide features that help people answer more questions. Tableau 8.1 is now in beta with a host of new analytical capabilities, from boxplots to one-click percentiles and ranking.

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

Ever wished you could easily share analytics with your colleagues? Ever wanted to collaborate on a dashboard with a customer or partner? Or wish you could access and work securely with data on your tablet, without having to VPN into your corporate network? But you couldn’t. Or you could, but didn’t want to download software or spin up an IT project. If so, then today is a big day. Today we’re announcing Tableau Online, a hosted version of Tableau Server in the cloud. It’s the fastest way to get up and running with a complete business intelligence platform. We take care of the infrastructure, you share analytics. It’s that easy.

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

If you don't have your ticket yet for the Tableau Customer Conference in Washington D.C., you're gonna want to pick it up before Friday, when the early bird discount expires. In addition to keynotes by Nate Silver, Charles Wheelan and Tableau's co-founders, we can finally announce some of the Tableau customers who will be speaking at TCC about how they use Tableau in their own companies. Alongside household names like LinkedIn and Wells Fargo, you'll have the chance to hear from small- and medium-sized companies and agencies, including AudienceAudit, Manpower Group and the Broad Institute. Read more for a full list of confirmed customer speakers.

Distinct counts are critical to analytics, whether it's counting individual patients in a hospital, the number of unique retail transactions, or the number of airplanes in a fleet. Taking distinct counts in Tableau is incredibly easy with a one-click way to change aggregations to count distinct. It is also, however, one of the more intensive calculations to perform and can be very slow, especially if you're data's huge. I'd like to share a few alternative ways to get the same answer as a count distinct.

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

Tableau Server has many built in features to promote data exploration, collaboration, and security. The Data Server is arguably the most powerful of these tools but is commonly overlooked and underutilized. Answer these questions to see how the Data Server can save you time and increase productivity. • Are you struggling to manage and update many large extracts while removing duplicates? • Do you want to refresh your extracts once and automatically update your workbooks? • Do you want to provide centralized management of your metadata? The ability to author a calculation once and share it with everyone, creating a standardized definition for each field? • Are you tired of having to deploy database drivers on each users local machines? • Do you want to simplify how your users access data stored in your databases? If you found yourself replying 'yes' to any of these questions, then it’s time to unleash the Data Server.

Header Concatenation: This was a new problem for me. Heck, it was a new word for me up until recently. Janet Shen, one of the incredible Viz Magicians from Tableau Professional Services sent me a great "How To" guide for overriding our default settings and I couldn't wait to share it. The useful content is ALL her. The silliness is all me. Hope you find this as helpful as I did! Click inside to get the step-by-step tutorial.

The release of the JavaScript API as part of Tableau's 8.0 launch has opened up an entire world of possibilities for people wanting to integrate Tableau visualizations within their existing business applications. Since I myself am not an familiar with JavaScript even in the slightest, I decided to sit down with someone from Tableau who is and get their perspective on how big a game changer this API really is. Fortunately for me (unfortunately for him) Michael Kovner, Tableau Product Consultant and JavaScript dabbler, sits close enough for me to harass on a near daily basis.

Today, our friends at Cloudera have formally launched their SQL-on-hadoop offering called "Impala". Did you know that Tableau was one of the first ISVs to support Impala?