Tableau 8.1 Released

Last week, Tableau released a fairly large update to its software platform. I just wanted to take some time to point out some of the larger changes that make Tableau even more useful to the business now. First, they have released R integration. This is a huge upgrade to Tableau’s predictive and statistical capabilities. Before R, we were limited to the basic functions such as trend lines or manual filtering of outliers. Tableau now has a native ability to dynamically connect to Rserve and get data from existing models into Tableau. This is accomplished by using the SCRIPT methods inside of a Tableau calculated field. A quick demonstration can be found here: R-Integration Next there’s the copying of worksheets and dashboards to different workbooks. If you work on a team or have multiple workbooks you need to combine in Tableau, you already know that it can be a pain to merge the workbooks. It is almost impossible to copy the completed dashboards to a new workbook. Usually, you end up creating bookmarks to worksheets, and if you are really brave, mucking with the actual XML (which is not supported by Tableau) to accomplish this task. Tableau has added the ability now to copy and paste worksheets and dashboards! The last update worth noting is that

Tableau has added a new visualization: the Box and Whisker plot. I find this type of graph useful when we want to look at the distribution of data at a glance. It’s a quick way to graph outliers, medians, quartiles, and minimums and maximums in a dataset. For examples, take a look here: Box and Whisker Plotting   Lots of other features have been added as well. You can see all the new features available by going to: New Tableau 8.1 Features