Tableau's Pace of Innovation

Released January 2012
See all of 7.0's features in detail here.

New Ways of Seeing

Tableau 7.0 kicked things off with new native visualizations: filled maps and area charts. Both just take one-click to display your data in a beautiful way, whether it's presenting geographic data or dissecting individual changes within trends over time.

But it wouldn’t have been a major release without improving existing features and making them easier to use, such as a redesigned Menu. Or maps that now wrap. Or how about our signature 'Show Me' feature? It's now a dynamic experience, actively suggesting chart types based on the data fields as you select them. It's also an exploratory experience, meaning you can switch between different views on the fly.

And then there's better geocoding. Ever have data that has GB, Britain, UK and a dozen more permutations of the same country? Now they all automatically point to the same place. Always.

Analytical Firepower

What would a new release be without more powerful ways to see and understand your data? With 7.0, we invited a host of new analytical tricks to the party, such as confidence bands, exponential trend models and deeper summary stats.

We also made a number of improvements to already existing features. Tooltips were enhanced with new action-buttons to keep you moving and analyzing your data at the speed of thought. Dates became easier to work with, including some better formatting customizations and even the ability to show dates with no data. And parameters are now just one click away when you want to let the user control reference lines, top N filters and bins.

For many of you, Tableau is about speed. How could we disagree?

The Data Server

As data grows in your organization, you need a good way to keep all those data connections, extracts and other files organized. The new data server in 7.0 is here to help, providing a one stop shop for centralized data management.

This means streamlined metadata. Rename a field, create a calculated field or build a hierarchy. Now, when other users connect to that data, they'll see the exact data as you cleaned it: the same field names, the same calculations, the same--you get the idea. And when you update that data, it will update for everyone else. One version of the truth.

The data server can also store data connections, acting as a proxy between users and databases, which IT will love--no need to install drivers on everyone's machines? Yes, please.

And of course, this is still Tableau Server, which means it's as secure as ever. All data connections will respect any security settings you set, whether in Tableau Server or the database itself. Published data sources can also be secured on a user by user basis.

Multi-tenant Server

Multi-tenancy allows Tableau Server to be segmented into separate sites, separating workspaces, content, users and workbooks--all while still using one instance of Tableau Server. Members of one site won't be able to view content from other sites.

If you serve reports to multiple clients via Tableau Server, you don’t want them to be able to see each other’s workbooks, users or projects. In fact, you probably don't want one client to even know the other even exists.

Just one more vote for privacy and security in this digital information age.

Released August 2011
See all of 6.1's features in detail here.

Tableau Goes Mobile

Author once, consume anywhere. That’s the Tableau philosophy and we carried it into the mobile frontier with 6.1 with a native iPad app. The app works directly with Tableau Server, which means you have the freedom to view your dashboards anywhere with a touch-optimized interface.

Pinch-to-zoom, swipe to scroll, all the ways of interacting that you’ve come to expect on a tablet are built right in to the experience, no extra work required.

And because no Flash is involved, you can even view vizzes published on the web through Tableau Public using the Safari browser with the same touch-optimized interface.

Fresh, Fast Data

Tableau’s in-memory data engine was already fast. In 6.1, we made it better. Incremental extracts drastically reduce the time it takes to update data you’ve already imported. Don’t have time to wait for that text file to be added to your database? Append it directly to your extract. And that doesn’t include the improvements to viewing data, previewing joins or even extracting data.

Did we mention 'Refresh All Extracts'? Connecting to your data is important--we just made it even easier.

A Truly Global Product

While Tableau is used around the world, many organizations have been patiently visualizing their data with English menus and commands. No longer! For the first time, in 6.1, Tableau was fully translated for the world audience, beginning with French and German with more languages on the road map.

We also added a new localization feature: locales. There are several ways to display date formats, currency symbols, even swapping periods/commas for thousand separators. Now, you can customize all of those--and more--depending on the location of the reader and present data in the way that makes the most sense to them. One less thing to be confused about.

Released November 2010
See all of 6.0's features in detail here.

The Data Engine

Do you find your database slow? Do you work with large text files or big spreadsheets? Allow us to introduce the Tableau Data Engine, a system that extracts your data and optimizes it for blazingly fast analytics.

Traditionally, in-memory extracts required all the data fit into RAM. Not so with Tableau's Data Engine, which is always aware of how much RAM is available locally. This means you can load data much larger than what your RAM has space for.

And if you decide you want to go back and directly connect to your data, you can just uncheck a box. Easy, fast and flexible, just the way a data engine should be.

Data Blending

Data doesn't always come neatly packaged in one box. There might be a stray CSV with crucial data you'd love to add to views you've already created. With Tableau's data blending feature, you can combine data from multiple sources together into a single view with a simple drag-and-drop. No code needed.

And you can create features that take advantage of having a combined data source, including filters, calculations, and more that work across multiple data sources.

Richer Analytics

The most significant addition to analytics in Tableau 6.0 was also one of the most important: user input. Not everyone has the same acceptable threshold for flight delay times, or for discounts applied to product sales. New parameters allow you to set these values and dynamically see the data change. They can also be used to switch between multiple fields, giving users total control of what they see.

We also added a suite of table calculation functions, giving users the power to quickly calculate percent of totals, percent differences, and so much more.

And because speed and ease are so important to us, we took our simple drag-and-drop philosophy into creating ad-hoc hierarchies. Simply drag one dimension on top of another to create a hierarchy and reorder the levels. Not one line of code needed.

Improved Server Management

As more and more people publish workbooks to Tableau Server, you need a good way to manage everybody's projects, security rights and even how often Server's cache refreshes. In 6.0, we created ways to do all of that, from a new content administrator role to the ability to batch manage users, in addition to other major usability features.

We also made Server itself easier to manage. Simply enter a URL to see the status of Server, along with better ActiveDirectory syncing and improved error reporting.

All to give you a smoother, faster experience when interacting with your data.

Released February 2010
See all of 5.1's features in detail here.

Tableau Public

There's a lot of data out there--most of it not being used. We want to change that, and Tableau Public is how we plan to get started. With Tableau Public, we're bringing our rapid-fire visualization program to a new audience in a free, consumer application. Anyone can publish a visualization of public data to the cloud and share it with the whole world wide web.

Why enable all of this for free? We believe in promoting data analysis in decision making, whether that's through data storytelling, web applications or simply making a data-informed statement.

We believe in the democratization of data. A free product for all people is just one step towards that goal.

Richer Data Presentations

The tools you use to present your data are often as important as the data itself. How does point A compare with the average? Is a sales manager reaching their quota? To answer these questions, we added reference lines, bands and distributions. Whether you want to see which data points cross a threshold or how many points are within one standard deviation of the median, reference lines can be built and customized to answer any question. They also open up new chart types, such as bullet charts and box-and-whisker plots.

Labels are also more flexible and can be set to show where and when you want them: end of trend-lines, only when points are highlighted, and much more. We also added more color palettes to choose from, giving you more control of how your data looks.

The Power of Customization

In 5.1, we added rich formatting to nearly every aspect you can dream of. Titles, annotations, tooltips, all of them can be customized for various fonts, colors and styles. Text can be made dynamic depending on filters, parameters and more.

But text is only one piece of a visualization. There's dashboard sizes, filter criteria and global dashboard actions. All three can also be customized, whether it's sizing your dashboard for a specific section of your corporate site or customizing how a worksheet filters the rest of a dashboard.

You know how to best present your data. Now Tableau is flexible to let you do so.

Released June 2009
See all of 5.0's features in detail here.

Active Views & Dashboards

Dashboards combine views to get a big picture of your data. In 5.0, we took dashboards a step further with active interactivity. Take highlighting, for example, which can be applied across worksheets to identify relationships and trends--whether by category, named individuals, date ranges or even a single data point.

Even individual worksheets on a dashboard can act as filters themselves. Clicking on a point on one sheet filters other sheets to relevant data, opening up many doors for deeper interactivity and faster insights. Actions can even be configured to contain URL links and point to other sites for more information.

Design Analytical Workflows

Rather than just provide static reports, we added a host of new features to create views that guide readers to new insights. There are new filters, such as single-select drop-down menus, search boxes, relative date filters, and more. They can also all be customized--along with legends and tooltips--to inform readers of what actions to take or what information to absorb. Try adding dynamic titles and captions based on viewer selections.

You can even guide viewers from one worksheet to the next using highlighting and filters to move between the sheets. New URL actions also let you lead readers to other sites with more detailed information separate from your data.

And now you can even create dual-axis charts to easily compare multiple measures across dimensions.

Expanded Data Access

You've got a lot of data sitting around, but only want to work with a small subset of it. With updated Tableau extracts, you can aggregate fields, roll-up dates or filter out certain columns altogether. This reduces the size of the data you import, making it much faster to work with.

Even connecting data is easier. In fact, it's as easy as copying and pasting--literally. Find interesting data on the web or in an email? Copy it, open Tableau and paste it right in. It's that easy.

Version 5.0 also adds the ability to import your own custom geocoding. There are many types of datasets that don't follow conventional geographic location, and now all of those can be imported and plotted with Tableau's maps. Think airports, congressional districts, store locations--anything to fit the desires of your analytical mind.

Server Improvements

With uses of Tableau Server growing in many organizations, more and more people want access to dashboards at the same time, so we've made Tableau Server capable of multi-threading. Instead of waiting for one request to complete before beginning the next one, multiple users can ask questions of the same dashboard at the same time. This means far shorter wait times.

And in case you find your internal server hardware struggling to keep up with that growth, you can install one instance of Tableau Server and distribute it across multiple server boxes. You're no longer constrained by the limitations of a single piece of hardware.

We've also added the ability to monitor how people are using Tableau Server, giving you the power to optimize it based on your organization's specific use case. When do people access dashboards? Which reports are most commonly used? How much space do they take up? And to help make answering those questions even easier, Server will now create database repository of its own data, which you can query using Tableau Desktop itself! How people view data is data on its own--now you can analyze it.