What’s new in Tableau 7

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.

Dynamic Sorting

Tableau now dynamically updates the sort order of marks on the screen, even as the underlying data values change. This was possible in Tableau 6.1 via calculated sorting but it now also works via the one-click sort buttons on the toolbar.

The viz below shows Country sorted in descending order by population. I used the one-click sort button to achieve this.

I manually changed China’s population to be 1 billion and refreshed the viz and it re-sorted the Countries so that China moved to second place.

Enhanced Tooltips

Tooltips now include statistics for the marks currently selected. Tooltips offer increased functionality with “Keep Only”, “Exclude”, one-click sorting and view data capabilities.

Dashboard improvements

The placement of worksheets onto a dashboard has been improved by the grey visual feedback indicating where the sheet is going to be placed.

Tableau Data Server

Tableau Data Server is a new component of Tableau Server 7. Data Server provides the ability for database connections and Tableau Data Extracts to be centrally managed. Users of Tableau Desktop can now:

• Connect to the Tableau Data Extracts on Tableau Server without having to download the data extract. The queries to populate the data extract are executed on Tableau Server rather than on the desktop. I.e. the data extract is created once and can then be used by multiple workbooks. This has the performance benefit that the data is not being extracted from the data source multiple times.
• Connect to a centralised connection (“proxy connection”) stored on Tableau Server. The benefit of this is that users don’t have to define connections themselves and nor are they having to have various pieces of database connectivity software installed, configured and updated on their computers. The database connectivity software is installed on the Server and then the connection centrally configured and made accessible to users.

Image copied from Tableau web site.

Conclusion

Tableau 7 has a lot to offer end users in terms of new and improved visualisation capabilities and easier to use functionality. It also has something for the IT department in terms of improved central management with the new Data Server.

This is a solid release from Tableau and I look forward to teaching it to classes and using it in the field.

Visit the Tableau web site for a full list of new features: http://www.tableausoftware.com/new-features/7.0

About the Author

Chris Kearns has been in the IT industry for over 20 years and has spent the last 15 years focussed on Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence.

Chris joined Altis Consulting as the first employee in 1998 and has worked as a Consultant, Quality Assurance Manager, Education Practice Lead, Account Manager, Tableau Certified Trainer, and Tableau Practice Lead. He has helped to deliver solutions to many customers across a variety of industries in Australia and New Zealand.

When not at work, Chris can be found on the tennis court, playing the guitar, singing or swing dancing;  usually not all at once.

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