TCC EU 2011- Premier of Tableau 6.1- Developers on Stage

Chris Stolte, Chief Development Officer, Tableau (co-founder, Tableau Software)- on-stage
Dan Jewett, VP of Product Management
Francoise Ajenstat, Director of Product Management

Some comments are the opinion of Freakalytics and not necessarily those of Tableau

This content is live blogged; there may be occasional errors or omissions.
 
 
Overview

Mission of dev team- “Help people see and understand their data.”
Make data fun
, anathema too many, but key to using data throughout the organization and entire decision-making process
 
 
Four key areas of investment for 6.1

Data performance
Sharing via mobile optimization with iPad
Localizing and globalizing the products- French and German
User experience- make every step easy, fast and fun!
 
 
Data architecture

Live connection to any data source that is already working at your company
– Continue to invest in this approach, very important

Unfortunately many people have data everywhere- Excel, CSV, text, tab-delimited, Access, some data marts, etc.   We want to make it easy for these people to also use their data!

1st example- 500 million words from Google books project, examining use of various words.   Results came back on his desktop in 5-10 seconds with 500 million records over 70 years.   NO DATA WAREHOUSING, just load your data into the extract!

Realized that you might want incremental additions to Tableau Data Extract.   Dynamically loading Tweets on conference.   Chris had data through 11 AM, but it is now 1:30 PM, he told the extract to refresh just data since 11 AM using the date time field.

You might have data from your data warehouse. But it isn’t uploading as frequently as you would like.   Tableau can add data to the extract from —another— source, not just the original data source!   e.g. – Monthly files are standard from database, but I have a critical weekly addition from a comma delimited file.   Can easily add it to the extract.
 
 
Many other new data features in 6.1

Faster extract creation with text files

Faster queries

Impersonation for SQL Server

Teradata LDAP authentication

Initial SQL when connecting to Teradata
 
 
Localization and Globalization

German and French now available in their language

Also expanded geocoding,

–                   Worldwide cities, more than 15,000

–                   Post codes for almost all countries

–                   Fields natively supported in your language!   (e.g.- US cities in German language)

–                   Even the map labels automatically adapt to your language and locale

–                   Workbook locale for dates, numbers, etc.
 
 
User experience

Pin and unpin from start page, clean up start page

View Data everywhere- data connections, custom SQL, at top of data pane- a commonly requested feature by accountants, financial people

From View Data you can now pick just part of the data- for example just some people’s names instead of all the data in the columns

Next feature from web site forums- refresh all extracts in workbook, new command on Data menu instead of individually selecting them

Improved pan and zoom on maps and charts

Links for dashboard images

Author control of legend layout

Dark map style with black background
 
 
iPad dashboards and more!

Rich visual analytics

Touch optimized for gestures

Consistent layout

Author once and work anywhere

Focus on many platforms, not just iPad direct with Tableau application

BUT should also work with regular web access

Automatically can tell on iPad

Interaction is awesome and smooth like an iPad app

Hard to tap right values in a filter list, it automatically gives you a touch optimized quick filter

Couldn’t easily multi-select before, but now I can hold down my finger to multi-select from a viewer

Actual app store application, regular web interface for login

Fun seeing our dashboard in the Tableau demo!

Pages example like the Hans Rosling TED demo

Authoring content for mobile platform- very easy and effortless, just like any other content!

Interactions subtly different, but in each platform- Windows desktop, Windows browser, iPad browser, iPad Tableau app.

Even on Windows browsers, new iPad features like gestures were carried over for pan/zoom/selection for end-user experience.


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