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A few weeks ago, I created a viz that tracks the position of the International Space Station using a live JSON feed and the Tableau Javascript API. Building this visualization requires a bit of coding, HTML, Javascript, and AJAX, but the code is very short and very straightforward.

This month, I received the news that I had finally reached a career-long goal of being named a Tableau Zen Master, Tableau’s highest honor. As I felt the outpouring of support from the community, I put a lot of thought into the most appropriate response. I quickly realized that simply responding to tweets or LinkedIn messages would not do it justice, so I’m documenting some thoughts here to share with the community.

How can I get automatically notified when the work queue gets larger? How can I get alerted whenever sales drop below a threshold? Tableau 10.1 begins to address these needs with the new conditional subscriptions feature. As one of the developers of VizAlerts, I’m thrilled that Tableau is building more functionality into the core product. Let me show you how you can use this new feature.

For PepsiCo, the journey to analytics success was not easy. There were many hurdles along the way. But by using Trifacta to wrangle disparate data, analyst Mike Riegling and his team reduced end-to-end run time of analysis by as much as 70 percent. And with Tableau, the team cut report production time as much as 90 percent.

Marketers, rejoice! We are excited to announce our new Marketo connector in Tableau 10. This new connector means you can connect directly from Tableau to see and understand your campaigns, leads, and lead activities—no ETL, data warehouse, or spreadsheets required.

According to Fast Company, “Both demand and salaries have been rising for people who can work with and analyze data.” Easy access to the tools to gain these skills is only half the battle. Unfortunately, you can’t just download viz-whiz skills like you can download a free copy of Tableau, but we’re here to help you expand your skill set.

In the great book Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, they have a great story about a local newspaper in a small town that says they would literally print names from the phone book if they could. They know that when people see their name, or the name of someone they know, there is an emotional attachment that gets the reader to care about the content. The same is true in data-viz land.

Last week, I learned that I was selected as a Tableau Zen Master. I am extremely excited and humbled to join such an exceptional group of Tableau talent. As I reflect on my journey, I wanted to share a few tips that helped me and will hopefully inspire others.

I never was very excited about working with data until after graduation. That’s when I learned what a joy it is to visualize my own data. I loved the idea of telling visual stories with data I actually cared about. I could finally see how data applied to my own life! I wish I’d known this back in college. So I thought I’d share six data visualizations I wish I had during my college years.