Tableau 5.0: Active Dashboards and Enterprise Scalability

Today we released to the public Tableau Desktop & Server 5.0, the newest version of our rapid-fire business intelligence products, with over 60 new features. Here’s why our 900 beta customers loved it:

Most Tableau customers already use dashboards extensively. Now there’s even more reason to love them: one-click highlighting and filtering that help you browse and understand data in context. It even works across data sources. (And do you notice the beautiful new visual selection model?) Try it live in a post about active dashboards, or read the white paper.

Even with all the sweet new analytic features, you could think of this as the server scalability release. Tableau Server is now a distributed, multi-threaded beast that can handle large deployments. Our initial scalability results showed that a 3-server configuration can handle deployments to about 2,000 users under simple load. To learn more about enhancements in Tableau Server, sign up for the server scalability web seminar.

Aside from all that, Tableau Server 5.0 adds SSL support, new administrative tools, and a number of performance enhancements including a local extract engine. So you can deploy big and make it fast.

If you find yourself building views to help others find data, or even if you’ve ever wished you could customize the fields shown in “View underlying data,” this is for you. In Tableau 5.0 you can create powerful guided analytic workflows to filter into many levels of detail, highlight specific data or link out to the web. It’s easiest to see it in person:

There’s a lot more that’s good in this release for authors. First, a whole set of new filter types that make browsing through data more flexible and easier. Then there’s dual-axes charts, which many of you have requested for a long time. You can see these live in this post on dual axes and filters.

Finally, there are a number of features that make it easier for you to get at and analyze your data. New extract options make it easier to aggregate your data and take it with you anywhere, even when you’re working with large data sets. You can connect to new file formats and new database versions, and even cut, paste and analyze data straight from the web or email attachments into Tableau. And with custom geocoding, you can add sales regions or other custom territories and map your data to that.

Here’s one last feature our beta users loved. Now you can keep files open when working in Tableau.

You can read about all these features on the what’s new page. To see more, you’ve got to download Tableau 5.0. Explore and enjoy!