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Make your Tableau viz rain by following these 10 tips.

Let’s be honest—some variant of bar charts and line charts are the best choices in terms of visualization best practices for the vast majority of the vizzes any of us will ever create. However, I think a chart’s appeal is sometimes more important than the best practices of the visualization you’re showing.

Southwest started with just a handful of Tableau Desktop licenses, but that number quickly grew. “As soon as we began sharing our dashboards, word began to spread,” says Tom Laney, a Business Consultant in the Data Science Center. Other teams began calling, asking about this tool that would not only connect to multiple data sources but also allow people to explore the data for themselves in real-time.

"The skills required for most effectively displaying information are not intuitive and rely largely on principles that must be learned," says Stephen Few in his excellent book Show Me the Numbers. In principle, I agree. But there is a problem: Some of the skills can only be learned by practice. Knowing what makes a purely functional chart doesn't teach you about human psychology and the need to engage as well as inform. Experience of failure and success, learned early on, teaches you as much as books.

You’ve done it. You’ve bought Tableau Desktop licenses, maybe even Tableau Server! You’re itching to get others on board and ready to toss out the old BI process and implement Tableau. Hooray! Now, where do you start?

What do Tableau fanatics do during the holiday season? Some create holiday calendars in Tableau. Others write Christmas poems about Tableau! This week, Tableau customer Amanda Meetze Baines sent us a lovely Christmas poem titled "Tableau before Christmas."

Starting in September, students could submit their favorite homework assignment along with details of their school using our online form. We were delighted to receive over 100 submissions, and without further ado, here are the winners.

When we see great stories of customers leveraging powerful tools and best practices to drive adoption of analytics at scale, it’s something we like to highlight to our community and help share those learnings. GoDaddy is doing just that with Tableau and our data cataloguing partner, Alation.

What a year it’s been for data viz! All throughout the year, we’ve been amazed by the creativity we’ve seen from you, the Tableau community. Not only have you told a wide range of data stories, but you’ve done so in innovative ways that we never would have imagined.