In line with its annual major release cycle, Tableau has today released version 7 of its software. This marks the seventh major release in the company’s seven year history which is quite an impressive achievement.
I have been playing with Tableau 7 during the Beta program and had an in-depth preview at the Tableau Customer Conference in Las Vegas in October 2011. Tableau 7 has some cool new features from both a front-end and back-end perspective, some of which I’ll share in this post.
This is by no means a full list of the new features. Visit the Tableau web site for a full list: http://www.tableausoftware.com/new-features/7.0
Filled Maps
Filled maps are available at the county level for the U.S. and country and state/province level for the rest of the world.
Growth in Employment image copied from the Tableau web site.
Profit by State
Population by Country
Area Charts
Area charts fill the area below the line in a line chart. They can be used to show the change in value for individual lines as well as the growth of the whole.
Flights Delayed at Chicago O’Hare image copied from the Tableau web site.
Show Me
By default, Show Me now remains open as a floating palette to simplify changing views (e.g. between a Text Table and a Bar graph) or to add new fields to a viz. It also now tells you how many Dimensions and Measures you need for a particular viz. Bar charts now default to horizontal.
Geocoding and Mapping Enhancements
Locations that are unknown to Tableau no longer unexpectedly appear at latitude zero, longitude zero off the West coast of Africa (what will this mean for the inhabitants of The Republic of Null Island?! http://nullisland.com). Tableau now displays a message at the bottom of the map stating the number of unknown locations and giving you the option to map them to locations that Tableau is aware of.
Tableau also caters for poorly spelt as well as foreign spelling of locations. Locations that it cannot understand are treated as per above. Custom latitude and longitude values can be entered on the fly for locations Tableau is not aware of.
New Main Menus
The main menus have been restructured. Example, there is now a new Worksheet and Dashboard menu making it easier to find things. The Table and Bookmark menus have been removed with their contents moved to other menus.