All stories

A dashboard is only effective if it answers useful questions for people. That’s why a customized, user-specific dashboard is more impactful than a ready-made, one-size-fit-all report. Here at Tableau, we always design visualizations with the user in mind. Here are several techniques we use to customize our sales dashboards.

Tableau 9.1 includes our new Web Data Connector, which lets you connect to any web data accessible over HTTP. In conjunction with this great new feature, we are excited to introduce the Tableau 9.1 Web Data Connector Software Development Kit. Want to quickly start building your own connectors? In addition to great documentation, a test simulator, and our JavaScript library, the SDK features a number of code samples to help kickstart your efforts.

Like any company, Tableau needs to make decisions about sales data. And as a data company, we’re always on the hunt for the best way to look at sales information. Here are five ways we look at our own operations to help make decisions about quota, territory management and must-win deals.

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.

For most of his career, Dave Story has been chasing the same idea: “making computers bring out the best in humans.” Dave is especially keen on using visual tools to augment the human brain. This fascination has taken him from Silicon Graphics (SGI) to Adobe, to Lucasfilm, to Tableau, with many stops in between. “They say two-thirds of the world is wired to think visually. I’m definitely one of those people,” Dave says.

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.

Most people understand the value and benefits of cloud as a deployment model. These include increased agility and efficiency of hardware resources, elasticity, metering, and lower cost. But cloud analytics solutions have evolved further to provide new drivers of business value–namely helping businesses become more integral and responsive to their customers’ needs.