Elissa Fink

Wow! So much information packed into the session. It was hard to take it all in. The audience was riveted, in part because healthcare is such a personal thing. Opening the session, David Jacques, MD showed the visual analogy of images that continue to drill down, from high-level drawings of the body down to depictions of DNA. He likens that to what they now can do with Tableau. The more detailed the data gets, the better and more accurate the decisions they can make. He hit the point home that while trends and averages are great, he really likes to see variances and outliers. To that end, he wants access to ALL the data.

What a great way to beat the after-lunch slump. Dr. Chris Stolte, VP of Engineering, had five of his developers come up and present cool ways to use Tableau. They didn't disappoint - but what we didn’t see coming was the quantity of bad puns we were about to experience.

First up was Max Berman who showed us how to incorporate custom images and shapes. He was able to take a diagram of teeth layout, “extract” each tooth as a custom shape and use it to represent tooth decay. So, instead of overlaying typical colored circle shapes over the teeth diagram, he over-layed each tooth filled with the representative decay color. There were many bad references to CEO, Christian Chabot’s teeth along the way.

By far and away the most popular session of the day. Standing room only left over a dozen people with no seat. Pretty amazing for the last session of the day and all in the interest of “time.”

Time is an important part of analysis. Things are constantly changing and our data can tell us that. If data is not constrained by time, it’s meaningless. Tableau has a number of filter options for managing the time dimension.

It's finally here - after a year of preparing and planning, we kicked off our 2nd Annual Tableau Customer Conference. What a pleasure it is to see it all come together. But the best thing is seeing customers and colleagues - some who are returning (like Dana Zuber, Bill Attridge, Steve Wexler, Michael Cristiani) and some for the very first time (Jim Griffin, Dawnita Gilmore, Margaret Rivera, Mr. James Austin). Over the next few days, I hope I'll have the chance to meet many or most of our 300+ attendees.

Today started with a couple of pre-conference workshops, both filled to near capacity. 112 people signed up to become designated as "Tableau Certified Professionals" and 58 joined in learning from the master, Stephen Few. Tonight is a friendly cocktail reception and tomorrow kicks off with a keynote from CEO Christian Chabot. We'll have sessions all day, with VP Engineering Chris Stolte and his team of developers mid-day showcasing some of their favorite and emerging development efforts.

Now if tempted to join us, it's actually not too late. And in fact, inspired by comments from Ted Cuzzillo, I realize that there are at least 3 reasons you should come that we never told you about.

I'm lucky. In my position, I get to talk to our customers and learn how they're using Tableau. Recently, I learned about Aspire Public Schools' license of Tableau and it inspired me.

Aspire's Director of Special Projects, Lynzi Ziegenhagen, said "Aspire Public Schools chose Tableau because it was designed with human beings in mind."

Maybe you've been trying to follow the election crisis in Iran. You probably know that traditional news media have been virtually locked out of the story and that Twitter feeds from Iranian citizens is one way people are staying informed (along with blogs and YouTube). If so, then you'll love this visual analysis from a trio of Tableau customers. Led by Logan Lynn of Interworks, they analyzed Tweets coming out of Iran regarding the election events there.

Logan got curious about the Tweets coming out of Iran and captured a day's worth of Tweets. He then used Tableau to visualize the data.

Later, Michael Cristiani of MIG and Joe Mako helped by crowd-sourcing additional visualization of the data. Logan added their work to his blog post.

Ferrari North America recently told their BI story at an IDC Business Intelligence symposium in NYC. Sandro Levati, FNA's Director of IT, described how he and his small IT team faced an almost prototypical BI problem: a time-consuming, inflexible and error-prone process with limited data analysis capabilities set amidst a sea of dispersed data, static reports from IT, and too many Excel spreadsheets. Their solution for the right BI for Ferrari NA? It all revolved around keeping it simple.

Is it surprising to read that BI adoption rates are worse than conventional wisdom suggested? A respected survey of the BI market reports that 92% of employees with access to BI do NOT actually use BI. They’re called “disenfranchised.” Conventional wisdom has always put the number of the “disenfranchised” at 80% (as if that’s acceptable). Stephen Swoyer's article in today’s “TDWI’s BI This Week” newsletter reported this (and more) based on the respected BI Survey (formerly the OLAP Survey) from Nigel Pendse and the Business Application Research Center (BARC). As the 8th in a series, this year’s survey seems quite interesting!

Did you remember this morning that it's April Fool's Day? Are you wondering who else in the world is playing jokes today and how you compare? Well, wonder no more. We've got the results of a semi-extensive survey about April Fool’s Day to answer your most pressing questions.

First, the basics. Just how immature do you have to be to prank someone? As it turns out, not very. As the visualization below shows, our "jokesters" (people who said yes, they'd be pranking someone this year) rated themselves only slight less mature than people who won't be pranking. But what seems to determine whethere you'll be pranking this year is how much you've pranked in the past. This year's pranksters pranked an average of 5 times in the last 10 years while non-pranksters have only pranked 1 time. I guess once a jokester, always a jokester.