On July 29th, the first-ever UK User Group for Tableau Software will meet. It's been a very grassroots effort from the UK and Andy Cotgreave of the University of Oxford is organizing the meeting. Pat Hanrahan, Stanford Professor and Tableau founder, is going to address the group.

Coming off the energy of the 2nd Tableau Customer Conference, it's great to hear about a group outside the US meeting up. 2009 has been a brutal year for travel budgets. Of the 300 conference attendees, 15 people or about 5% came from outside North America, including 4 from the UK. Many of our European customers told us they wanted to come but the trip was simply too far. This group offers a forum closer to home for them.

Executives always say employees are their most valuable asset, but who really measures that? Heather Torres, AOL’s Director of Global Workforce Analytics, does and tells us that all of their metrics have driven action. Heather speaks as real and as personally as if she was talking just to you over a cup of coffee.

From the moment Garr Reynolds literally jumped on state, the audience was laughing. The laughter didn’t stop for the whole hour. This guy knows how to present! His pace was quick, maybe 5 seconds or less per slide and his delivery was engaging and interactive. He could have just as easily been a standup comedian.

Jürgen Marke is an Operational Intelligence Analyst with the European Anti-Fraud Office (OLAF), which conducts internal and external investigations into irregular or fraudulent activities concerning the financial interests of the European Union. Tableau is used to help analysts visually identify patterns in fraud, and is often more effective than automated statistical analysis.

Day 2 of Tableau's Customer Conference kicked off with a fantastic talk on data visualization by Stephen Few: "Perceptual Zen: Learning to Meaningfully See". Riffing off Garr Reynold's Zen theme from Garr's upcoming Presentation Zen talk, Stephen presented his 8 core ideals for effective data visualization tools.

Says Stephen: Data visualization is just a tool. We could build houses before we had hammers and saws, the tools just let us do it better. That is, assuming we've developed the skills to use the tool effectively.

Good data visualization takes the burden of effort off brain and puts it on the eyes. 8 core principles that let us accomplish that are:

Erin Easter, Lead Technical Writer, and Wade Tibke, Marketing Systems Manager, certainly know how to provide great beginner tips without making them seem overwhelming. In a very comfortable and personal way, they offered 10 tips every beginner should know.

It's impressive that over half the attendees in this session are already using Tableau’s maps. Given that Tableau automatically finds geo fields in your data such as country, state, and zip codes, it’s no wonder maps are a popular feature. In the Tableau interface geo fields are highlighted with a globe icon next to the field name for easy reference.

After surveying the crowd and finding nearly all attendees are sharing data internally, Dan Jewett, VP of Product Management, asked the attendees who currently shares data externally, or outside of company firewalls. Hardly a hand went up.

Pushing data online is a relatively new concept for many. While as consumers we may have accessed online data (typically static), we’re not so sure about how to get data online, what the uses of data on the Web might be, and the benefits of sharing data globally.

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.