All Tableau Community Stories

When I first got a Fitbit, it was amazing. My daily dashboard, focusing mostly on a 10,000-step target, was incredibly motivating. Was I hitting the target? Answer: sometimes. Connecting with friends added great gamification. I began making different choices in my daily routine to take more steps. When I lost my first tracker, Fitbit sent me a free replacement. Wow! What more could I ask from this dream company? Over time, however, I stopped going back to the dashboard as often.

Back in October, I shared the Tableau challenge workbook with fellow data explorers at the Tableau Conference, and many people asked me, “How can I make something similar?” So I thought I’d walk you through the steps. There are three major components to building a Tableau application: data, framework, and formatting.

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.

It’s an exciting time for the Tableau community. We recently added a new feature to make it easier for everyone to connect with each other. At Tableau, we believe that data isn’t limited by language; data is understood across the globe. That’s why we are proud to announce that the Tableau community now has auto translation for forum threads!

Each Tableau user has a story to tell. A popular theme is that visualizing data leads to insights that were never before seen. The hero of this story is the one who sees and understands data using Tableau. But what about this insight? Rarely do we ponder where creative and insightful people come from. According to Sir Ken Robinson, they are made by nurturing their unique talents and passions.

Dr. Hannah Fry has a confession to make. She has not always loved data. Fry is a lecturer in the mathematics of cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. And it makes sense that she would be drawn to math’s clear logical proofs.

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.

We are delighted to announce the 2015-2016 Tableau Zen Masters. Our community continues to amaze us. We recognize the hours of dedication put in by our biggest champions. The contribution might be on the Forums, on Social Media, in their blogs, User Groups, the Tableau Foundation, or anywhere else there are people needing new ways to see and understand their data.

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.

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.

Things are heating up on those cyberfields. It's time to prepare for the draft and create a fantasy team to beat all others. Fantasy sports are a huge business with Fantasy Sports Trade Association calculating that over 56.8 million people play fantasy sports in the USA and Canada. Right before the 2014 fantasy football season, the FSTA estimated that there were 33 million fantasy football players alone!

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.