Tableau Public Makes Data Social

February 12, 2010

Tableau Public, available for free, lets anyone who posts content to the web easily create interactive visualizations and publish them to blogs, web sites, Twitter feeds or anywhere online. Instead of viewing static charts or tables, Tableau Public lets people answer questions and share data interactively on the web.

“Imagine if online data was as fun and accessible as online video,” said Christian Chabot, Tableau’s CEO and co-founder. “We created this product because we want to make data a first class citizen on the web. We want to change the way people interact with data online by letting them tell stories with flexibility and beauty.”

Current alternatives for sharing data online are clumsy. Typically, data is pasted into tables and lists, or posted as files or catalogs that are difficult to use. Tableau Public is helping to solve this challenge – bringing data to life on the web for ordinary people. With its interactive visualizations and dashboards, Tableau Public helps people start conversations based on data that is useful, beautiful and shareable. No special plug-ins are required, all that’s needed to see and use the data is a web browser.

From bloggers and journalists to researchers and students, Tableau is already being used as a tool to create conversations with data. For example, Timothy Ellis at SeattleBubble.com, a community blog focused on the local housing market, is using Tableau to increase the depth of conversations about the changing real estate market.

Robert Kosara, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, recently used Tableau Public to compare temperature data collected from 343 weather stations over twenty years, or 77,172 observations. He was able to show warming trends clearly and posted a blog about global warming. “I was impressed how Tableau helped me create a more analytical visualization that was easy to share on the web. It’s an amazing product, and I regularly use Tableau for my Visual Analytics class,” said Professor Kosara.

Tableau Version 5.1

In conjunction with the general availability of Tableau Public, the company is also releasing today Version 5.1 of its Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server product suite. Version 5.1 provides more analytic richness, better publishing, and increased scalability and performance. Analytical features include reference bands that provide context to a user’s analysis, bullet charts to evaluate related data, and intelligent data labels to call out the most critical data. New publishing features include rich formatting, streamlined toolbar design, more filter options, and a flexible layout.