Customer Inspired
When our customers speak, we listen. Why? Among other reasons, they have some of the best product ideas. In fact, for this release, we decided to focus half of our features on our customers' ideas. This includes features such as data window folders for easy organization, more design freedom with quick filters you can format, and also transparent dashboard objects.
We also added a number of customer-requested usability features, including the ability to copy worksheets and dashboards between workbooks, allowing you to easily combine views from one workbook to another, including the data connection.
To our customers, thank you. Keep the ideas flowing.
Sophisticated Analytics
In Tableau 8.1, we added box-and-whisker plots to 'Show Me' for a one-click overview of your data. You'll also find RANK, a new function for quickly ranking your data and breaking ties, as well as a new aggregation level, PERCENTILE, for easily showing the Nth percentile of your data set.
We also made improvements to one of our most popular 8.0 features: forecasting. When making predictions, it's important to always account for uncertainty, so we added adjustable prediction bands. You can also tweak the forecasting model to use multiplicative models.
Finally, if you work with statistics and data-mining, then you know R, a popular and fast-growing open source program for data analysis. Now, you can integrate it into Tableau for a one-two punch of data visualization and data science. Import R packages, libraries or any of your saved data models into Tableau for fluid interactions, easy data manipulation and rich presentations.
Enterprise-level Integration
In the first of many updates focused on large enterprises, we released all Tableau products as 64-bit applications, allowing anyone to take full advantage of their machine's memory for faster queries and more analytical muscle. This also helps Tableau Server and Tableau Cloud scale to even more users, more data, and more questions answered. We also added support for Tableau to communicate over the IPv6 protocol.
This also means even deeper business integration for Tableau Server, which can now use SAML as an authentication method for a single sign-on experience across multiple programs. It can also be configured to use load balancers to make any Server deployment even more resilient. We've also eliminated any downtime when taking a backup.
You'll also see several other improvements, such as alerts when extracts fail to refresh,
permission enhancements and a better guest account option.
More Data, No Problem
Getting to your data is always the first step towards answering your questions. That's why in this release, like all releases, we continued to improve our native data connections and take full advantage of what each data store has to offer. We added additional functionality to our Google Analytics and Google BigQuery connectors, as well as support for Stored Procedures for other databases. For users looking to create Tableau Data Extracts, we've made the Data Extract API available for Linux as well.
But working with your data doesn't just mean new connectors and databases, it means letting you do more with the data you already have. The new DATEPARSE function allows you to easily convert text strings into dates. Just tell Tableau which part is the year, the month, and so on, and you're set.