Sneak Peek: Analytical Firepower

Business users need intuitive and powerful analytical tools to easily answer the hard questions.

Tableau 7.0 brings with it enhanced parameters, statistical features, sorting, domain completion and more! We have redesigned the product to makes analytical tasks easier and more intuitive, which will significantly expand your ability to see and understand data.

Statistics
Statistics are a data analyst’s best friend. Most applications lack many of the fundamental statistical models required to create meaningful visualizations. Tableau 7.0 provides enhanced statistical capabilities to enrich the analytical process and make your visualizations even more dynamic and powerful.

A preview of some enhancements in the statistics module include:
• Enhanced trend model description.
• Exponential trend line.
• Enhanced summary window.
• Export trend model data.
• Trend line confidence bands.

This example is showing the relationship between shipping volume and cost. The user has switched the trend line to the new exponential trend model so they can start forecasting.

1-click sort
Sorting is one of the most useful and commonly used operations when analyzing data. In Tableau 7.0 sorting is easier then ever. Throughout the user experience, sorting indicators are now available to sort directly in the visualizations. Sorting is where you expect it to be, making it easier to achieve the results you want.

This example shows that a view can be sorted from the header at the top of the visualization, the axis at the foot, as well as the tooltip. By allowing users to sort in multiple places a typically long task can be accomplished in seconds.

Improved Tooltips
Tooltips have been significantly improved to offer more analytical features and information. For instance, tooltips now include summary statistics for the current selection. You can also view data, keep only, exclude and even sort directly from the tooltip. By enabling common tasks and answering common questions, users can analyze their data more efficiently.

This example shows a user who has selected several marks and Tableau is displaying summary statistics in the tooltip. The tooltip also enabled the user to keep only, exclude, view data and sort.

Domain Completion
Sometimes the data that is not present can be as valuable to see as the data that is present. When there is a missing point in your data, Tableau will now automatically generate missing dates or numeric bins when “Show Missing Values" is checked.

In this example, the view shows maximum temperature over a range of days. However, there are two missing days in the data (Thursday and Friday). With "Show Missing Values" selected, we see a break in the line and the missing dates are shown in the axis.

Easier Date Interactions
Working with dates is one of the most common ways business users engage with data. The ability to easily work with dates can save a significant amount of time. New date features let you easily switch between discrete and continuous dates which allows straightforward date manipulation no matter your goal.

In this example, you’re looking at data on US flights and are clicking from year to quarter to month and seeing a beautiful continuous area chart.

Coming Soon
Happy Holidays from everyone here at Tableau.

The next Sneak Peek blog post will cover the Tableau 7.0 and the new Enterprise Capabilities we have built.