For those of you Stephen Few fans out there, June marks the release of his latest book, Now You See It: Simple Visualization Techniques for Quantative Analysis. Many folks at Tableau have their heads buried in it - it's garnered a lot of praise for easily outlining information on how to build core skills for visual analysis as well as hone skills in regards to diverse types of visual analysis. And we're thrilled that the book is part of his Visual Business Intelligence workshop at this year's Customer Conference, in Seattle July 20-23, 2009. Sign-up and the book is yours free. Better hurry though - we're down to just a handful of spaces.

Just a quick reminder to Tableau Software customers. Today is the last day to earn the "early bird" discount for our first ever Customer Conference. It's just just 10 weeks away - July 20-22 here in Seattle at the Edgewater Hotel. Registrations so far have been very brisk so register today to guarantee your spot. You can get the early bird promotional code from your account manager or email us and we'll contact you.

We've added a slew of best practices and hands-on training sessions (check out our website for session descriptions). For example:

The January 2008 newsletter from Perceptual Edge is an excellent description of Cycle Plots by Naomi B Robbins Ph.D, which are a less known way to look at trend data. On her website, you can find a link that describes how you can create these views in Excel and provided the input data. I think it is great when people give you access to the data that is shown in examples. I used the same data to build a cycle chart in Tableau in a couple of minutes.