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How do you know your work is effective? And how can you improve it? One way is to emulate the 17th century coffeehouse patrons who led the age of Enlightenment.

The future of data is in the cloud. As options for cloud data emerge, we continue to add connections to them. We want to ensure Tableau customers can always work with all of their data. That's why we’re thrilled to share our plans to add a Google Cloud SQL connector to Tableau Online. Additionally, the Google Cloud SQL connector has been added to Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server as of today.

For social media marketers, the world is full of choices—often too many choices. Which hashtag should I use? When should I post that Facebook update? What’s the best tool for collecting data? Our social media team is constantly experimenting to see what’s possible with data. Not only do we analyze our own social media channels, we also use social data to explore broader conversations. Over the past year, we’ve pushed ourselves to ask deeper questions, especially about conversations on Twitter. Using data collected from Tableau partner DataSift, we’ve analyzed World Cup hashtags, SXSW session popularity, and journalists' use of Twitter during the UK general election.

The Tableau community produced a plethora of posts in May, from a commentary on how to approach viz building that provides great time and sanity saving insights, to a detailed comparison of Tableau Server performance on EC2.

Hundreds of Tableau enthusiasts tuned in for the first European-led Tableau 9.0 Virtual User Group event earlier this month. We showed off the shiny new features of Tableau 9.0, which help data explorers stay in the flow of their work. Psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihaly calls this flow the secret to happiness, as Tableau’s own Andy Cotgreave explained during his keynote.

In 2013, when I took on a new role as a BI analyst for a nonprofit network of charter schools in Indianapolis, I had no prior experience in business intelligence. Fast-forward to August of 2014: I received a rock in the mail. I’d become a Tableau Zen Master. At first, I thought they had made a mistake and I tried to send the rock back!