Tableau reader 93/28/2023 Organizations that are looking for ways to make information available to whomever needs it, along with most of the features that Tableau provides for interacting with data (sorting, filtering, etc.) will welcome Tableau Reader as manna from heaven. In Tableau Desktop 3.5, even if the display will be viewed by others in a Web browser or you’re sending it as an email attachment, you can save it as a Packaged Workbook file, so that what gets passed on contains everything that’s needed. In previous versions, if you wished to make the display available to others, the process of packaging all of the files that were needed was painful and time-consuming. Sometimes data displays that are used for analysis or reporting involve multiple files, such as several data sources and sometimes even images that are incorporated into the display (for example, a map). This works great, but what if you wanted to focus on the two decaf products without losing a sense of how they compare to the whole, the complete set of 13 products? Now, through legend highlighting, you can accomplish this by dimming out all lines in the graph except the decaf products, which allows you to focus on specific data without losing a sense of how it relates to the whole. For instance, if you wanted to closely compare the two decaf products without being distracted by the other eleven, you could filter out the other eleven. The graph below is certainly not one that you would want to present to others for the purpose of making fine comparisons between these 13 products, but it is one that you might use during the process of data analysis to get the big picture of what’s going on.Īs it is, however, if you wished to compare the performance of particular products through the year, this display is too cluttered and the process of associating the labels that appear in the legend to the appropriate lines in the graph is time-consuming. The new legend highlighting feature makes this possible in an incredibly simple manner. Sometimes you want to quickly focus your attention on a subset of data that appears on the screen without filtering out everything else. This improvement, along with others the folks at Tableau have been focusing on make it much easier to pass the results of your analysis on to others without having to spend time to polish the display. If you were the analyst who created the display, you knew these field labels because they appeared elsewhere on the screen, but if you passed the display on to someone else as an image, those field labels would not have been included. In the example below, the label “Product Type / Product” would not have appeared in the body of the display as you see here. Prior to this release, labels were not included in the display for fields of data that appeared in the columns (as opposed to the rows). It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes to reduce everything that isn’t data to a minimum and to make other simple changes such as orienting labels horizontally whenever possible. The visual appearance of Tableau was already quite good, but with this release they have managed to make them even better by following some of the visual design principles that I advocate (and Tufte advocated long before I did). I’m not going to review all of the new features of this release and none of them in detail, but want to briefly mention and describe those that I find most interesting. The features that they decide to include are not turned over to developers to code as quickly as possible with little direction they first go through a rigorous design process to make sure that they are implemented in the most effective way possible. Rather, they understand the needs of their customers well enough to discriminate between features that really matter and those that would take the product in an unproductive direction. They don’t just tick items off a features list that was composed from customer requests. After recently being briefed on version 3.5 by the folks at Tableau, I concluded the meeting with the following statement: “You guys continue to amaze me with how many important features you’re able to address in each release, thoroughly and without compromising quality.” The team at Tableau succeeds better than any other software design and development team I know in identifying the most important next steps in the product’s evolution and proceeding through those steps expertly and thoughtfully. I have reviewed every release of Tableau, beginning with version 1.0 and continuing now with the latest release, version 3.5.
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