Announcing the Launch of Tableau Public 9.0

We're excited to announce that Tableau Public 9.0, the latest version of our free software that lets you quickly and easily create richly interactive data stories for the web, is now available for both Mac and Windows!

Please note that if you're currently using Tableau 8.2.3 or lower, you'll need to update to version 9.0 in order to save your visualization to the Tableau Public servers. You'll still be able to create visualizations using these older versions, but you won't be able to save them to the web unless you update to the latest version. The good news is you can do that for free.

Looking for Tableau Desktop 9.0 for your proprietary data? Download the free 14 day trial.

Smart Meets Fast with Tableau Public 9.0

With the ninth major release of our revolutionary software, we've made it even easier for you to quickly find powerful insights in your data, and we've given you even more ability to customize the look and feel of the data stories you publish for your readers.

Tableau Public vizzes have been benefiting from smooth tooltips and smart maps in the browser for a few months already, and now these features are also available while you create your workbook in the application itself.

What Else is New in 9.0?

The Tableau Public team will be blogging about the new features in 9.0 over the course of the coming weeks. Here's a quick list of what we think you'll find most exciting:

• A redesigned start experience that gives you quick access to resources and inspiring examples
• New data prep tools designed to reduce the amount of time you spend wrestling with cross-tab style spreadsheets that have messy headers and footers
• Smart maps with geographic search and lasso or radial select, and updated U.S. census data layers
• Story Points formatting options that let you customize the fonts and colors of your data stories
• Powerful new analytics features that enable you to ask and answer questions of your data without leaving your workflow

Additionally, we've made a number of changes "under the hood" to improve the overall speed and performance of your vizzes, such as consolidated and parallel queries that will make your dashboards load faster for your readers. We know how much that matters. For more information about the new features packed into our latest version, check out the Tableau 9.0 New Features site.

Show Me Some Examples!

We'd like to whet your appetite for all the great new features by showing some examples of the new version in action.

First, the new Map Search function and formatted Story Points are included in this U.S. college map created with IPEDS data that lets readers zoom to a particular city, county, state or zip code. Try it out for yourself! Also notice that Data Layers are back and updated with current U.S. census statistics. This map features counties shaded by 2014 population:

Next, we stumbled on this fascinating data set over at data.gov.uk that shows the number of arrests of Barclay's Premier League fans, by team and type of offense. Here's what it looks like in Excel:

An example of a cross-tab style spreadsheet with headers and footers.

Not pretty, right? In the past it would have taken quite some time to clean up this spreadsheet before ever connecting it to Tableau. With the new Tableau Data Interpreter, this clean-up is done entirely in the "Connect to Data" experience and takes less than a minute. This short video shows how to turn on the Data Interpreter to ignore the headers and footers, pivot the "Type of Offense" columns, split the resulting column, and rename the newly created fields:

The Tableau Data Interpreter in action!

We hope you're as excited as we are about these new features. Be on the lookout for blog posts from Team Public in the coming weeks that go into even greater depth on each of them.

Happy vizzing in Tableau Public 9.0! We're looking forward to seeing what you create.