By Dmitry Gudkov, Business Intelligence Consultant
Tableau Software recently made publicly available Version 8.0 of its BI platform. As I mentioned in a previous article – starting from Version 8, Tableau can honestly be considered a mature product. It’s good to see that Tableau team continues to keep good balance between improving existing functionality and adding new features.
Among the most notable improvements are:
- Faster rendering engine capable of managing hundreds of thousands of marks
- Row-level data blending
- Free-form dashboards
- Manually defined sets with set algebra
- Redesigned Marks Card and new Administrator Views.
Additionally, the new features include:
- Web (and mobile) authoring
- New direct connectors to Salesforce
- Google Analytics
- Google BigQuery and a few other data sources
- Neat JavaScript API for embedding Tableau into external web applications.
All in all, we see Tableau keeps being devoted to highly visual storytelling. The flexible layout and new chart types push data visualizations further into the designer-level info-graphics area, but now with expanded support of cloud-hosted data sources and deeper integration with 3rd party applications. We at Bardess, met the new release with great enthusiasm. Here are a few thoughts from some of our team members:
“I’m very excited about the new APIs. More and more of our time is spent fine-tuning the user experience. Customer expectations are rising fast and we love new tools to deliver great experiences.” – Jay Jakosky.
“Already Tableau has emerged a visualization heavyweight amongst top business intelligence tools, but with the inclusion of freeform dashboard controls I’ll be able to provide compelling analytics with pixel-point precision. Tableau 8 is going to make some noise!” – Ryan “The VizKid” Trybus.
“The positive reception of this release is unparalleled. At a recent product tour, a pact crowd was teeming with excitement about these new features. For those looking to increase enterprise adoption, Tableau’s positive energy makes an easy sell to everyday users.” – James Schintz.
“The most visually compelling dashboards have a crisp, logical layout. T8’s overlapping dashboard objects, with increased control over their placement and sizing, allow for even more control during dashboard design and will drive higher levels of comprehension and acceptance.” – Keith Smith.
About the Author
Dmitry Gudkov is a Business Intelligence Consultant at Bardess Group Ltd. His experience with analytical systems started when he was a Sales Analyst at large corporation and then he started developing analytical applications himself. Dmitry has extensive experience with BusinessObjects and Cognos, and switched to QlikView in 2009. As a developer, he makes special emphasis on user-friendliness and usability of analytical applications.
