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Tableau's features are carefully designed to help people transform data into meaning. The easier it is to express ideas in a calculation language, the more meaning people can generate. Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions allows people to express powerful concepts using simple statements.

Do you think big data doesn’t apply to marketing? Wrong: it does. The good news is that it's not too daunting.

This is the first post in a three-part series that will take a large amount of information about Tableau data extracts, highly compress that information, and place it into memory — yours.

'Easy Empty Extracts' Sounds like a kids' tongue-twister. But it's actually a hot Tableau tip, courtesy of our very own Ryan Stryker, Sr Business Consultant, Tableau Professional Services. Thanks, Ryan! Extracts are not a hard sell; the performance gains we see through the local materialisation of data views are usually staggering. And Tableau Server gives us a handy platform for auto-magically refreshing it all. For large extracts, though, it can be quite time-consuming to create a desktop version before publishing to the server. Understandably, customers often ask if there’s a way to “just have Server do it”. Of course there is.

Ever wished you could easily share analytics with your colleagues? Ever wanted to collaborate on a dashboard with a customer or partner? Or wish you could access and work securely with data on your tablet, without having to VPN into your corporate network? But you couldn’t. Or you could, but didn’t want to download software or spin up an IT project. If so, then today is a big day. Today we’re announcing Tableau Online, a hosted version of Tableau Server in the cloud. It’s the fastest way to get up and running with a complete business intelligence platform. We take care of the infrastructure, you share analytics. It’s that easy.

As a marketing professional, I have a soft spot for customer stories that showcase Tableau at work in marketing departments. So it’s gratifying when I hear about customers combining their data muscle and Tableau chops to segment audiences, engage prospects, and provide meaningful content about their product or service.

Tableau for Teaching (TfT) is a program that offers free classroom use of Tableau for instructors aiming to help their students better analyze and visualize data. Participants vary in discipline, from business administration, computer science, to public health. Recently, students at the Rutgers University Graduate School of Communication and Information shared their class project with us. Their instructor, Professor Anselm Spoerri assigned the class to evaluate and design innovative visualizations.