Tableau 8 Guide

Recently released:  Tableau 8: The Official Guide   by George Peck

 I am in the midst of a project that specifies Tableau, and searched for several fairly obscure examples, and found them in this book.   Good sign.   Have used Tableau since soon after its release.   Tableau has an increasingly complex User Interface, because it covers lots of ground.  Will follow with a review as I read.  The book's site, with sample chapters.

" ... Present a unified view of complex BI using the entire Tableau 8 toolkit

Create and distribute dynamic, feature-rich data visualizations and highly interactive BI dashboards—quickly and easily! Tableau 8: The Official Guide provides the hands-on instruction and best practices you need to meet your business intelligence objectives and drive better decision making. Discover how to work from the Tableau GUI, load BI from disparate sources, drag and drop to analyze data, set up custom visualizations, and build robust dashboards. This practical guide shows you, step by step, how to design and publish meaningful business communications to end users across your enterprise. ... ? 

Army Visualization

The US army / SAIC is using Tableau for Data visualization.   This appears to be a descriptive visualization, as  opposed to an analytic example " ... "We have all this equipment that has accumulated over all those operations and they're sitting over in Afghanistan and we're coming out," said Driessnack, who was speaking at the Tableau Customer Conference in National Harbor, Md., on Monday.  Tableau Software specializes in making data digestible through visualization systems, and works with both the private and public sectors. An example of SAIC’s visualization program is a map that shows how many Army ambulances are at locations around the globe ... " 

Hardest Part of Data Visualization

Much agree.  Simplicity of development, and then simplicity of understanding through interaction are key elements.  Tableau is good at this, but could also be better.    I suggest taking a look at some of their examples. Paul Lilford of Tableau talks about data source integration, a key issue: "  ... With visualization, there is an “ongoing challenge with the size of data and disparity of it,” according to Lilford. From a customer challenge perspective, “it’s really about getting to the size of data, all the sources of data, all the scale of things.” With Tableau being a data-driven company, the strategy is to combine all data sources quickly, helping customers make more data decisions at a detailed level. Social, web, third party, ERP — all these data sources have to lead to “something that’s consumable for business users.” ... " 

Big Data for the Masses

Can everyone be a data scientist?  You will at very least need the strong support of data scientists. Similar to delivering analytics to everyone.  Its not so much about the technology to extract data from large and volatile sources, but about automating basic analysis and guiding the user to insights.   Not too much different from efforts by Tableau to do the same thing.  But taking this beyond just visualization analytics.  Insights that are useful to their business. A startup at Stanford is trying to deliver this.   Following. " ... 'Through powerful analytic models developed over a decade at Stanford, Ayasdi lets you find the needle in a haystack you didn't know was there, quickly.” Jonathan Ballon, GE’s chief strategy officer, said in a statement. “For GE and our customers with vast amounts of industrial data, Ayasdi's technology will be a powerful tool for predictive analytic models that can drive billions of productivity and efficiency savings."  ... '

Tableau Visualization in the Cloud

Visualization in the Cloud.   A simple thing really, but useful in many cases. Demonstrated to me.  " ... Tableau Online, priced at $500 per user per year, is in essence a Tableau-hosted version of Tableau Server. The idea is to make it easier to use Tableau for sharing sensitive data and analysis inside organization, without the need to install and maintain your own instance of the server. Tableau Online will connect with some other enterprise cloud data such as Salesforce.com, Google Analytics and BigQuery and Amazon Redshift. ... "