Learning from Tableau, and from you

This old Tableau dog learned a few new tricks over the past couple of days. And most of it was not from fellow Tableau employees.

Here's a sampling from the Tableau presentations I saw. (I'll post links and further instructions and screenshots, as they become available, to show you how to do these things.)

* From Ross Bunker's advanced calculations talk, I learned about Pareto analysis.

* From a couple of the advanced talks (including Ross's and Marc Reuter's), I learned how to introduce a rank to sorted fields.

* From Michael Drumheller, I learned about the F-statistic and its importance for determining whether categorical factors are significant in a trend model.

* From Ty Alevizos, I learned that you can make box plots in Tableau!

* From Dan Jewett, I learned a number of things about the server experience, but most particularly the simple pleasure of reordering your favorites. (Note: This is a 4.0 feature, still in beta.)

These were all pretty cool, but the best part was learning from you, the customers of Tableau. From pharmaceuticals to space science to beverages to education to government, you welcomed us into your industries for a couple of short days and gave us a tremendous number of new ideas for the future, while showing us what you've managed to do with Tableau. The interactions with you all were simply amazing.

More to come -- but for now, after a couple of very intense days, I really need some BBQ....