The Best of The Tableau Web: 2014

This year has seen an explosion of blogs about Tableau. It's hugely enjoyable to read your posts each month. Whether its beginner tips, jedi hacks or constructive commentary, we're always cheered by the time people spend sharing their ideas. Each month we curate the best content in our Best Of... series. I teamed up with Lari and Sophie from the Tableau Product Marketing team to look back at the year and choose a favourite from each post.

Sophie says, "In this post Andy Kriebel shows you how to make Bollinger charts. I think this post captures two of best things about Tableau: the ability to create great visualizations, and Tableau’s great community – where people share, and improve on each other’s work"

Sophie says, "Sometimes we see something that blows us away. This is an example. It's beyond the comprehension of most of us, and it might not even be practical, but it is amazing seeing people like Noah pushing Tableau to its limits."

Sophie says, "It’s true that 80% of any analysis is cleaning and formatting the data – it’s also true that this is the step that confounds most people. I think this post is fantastic because it explains why you often need to re-format your data and also how easy this can be. "

Lari says, "This post by Keith describes the concepts in one of Joe Mako's presentations. Joe Mako is such an important member of the community it's inevitable he appears on a list like this. What Keith does in this post is capture the way Joe describes Tableau in ways that are useful for novices and experts."

Lari says, "Kelly Martin always writes entertaining posts. They're normally instructional but this time she took a break to share the effect that Tableau, and rapid-fire visual analytics, has had on her and her friends."

Lari says, "Data blending is powerful and useful, but it can be confusing as well. This post explains what’s going on with a data blending scenario. Not only do we come away with a working data blend, we understand a bit more about how Tableau works."

Andy says, "This is exactly what I look for in a good instructional blog post. It has great illustrations accompanied by tight, well focussed commentary. It's just the kind of post people who're relatively new to Tableau should read."

Andy says, "I always enjoy seeing a How-To about something pretty advanced. I enjoy seeing our community come up with new ways around issues. I'd guess that only a small amount of people would use Joshua's idea but that to me isn't the point. What's great is that he had an idea, and shared it. It's now there, Google-able, for anyone else who might need that info in the future."

Andy says, "This is my favourite post of the year. It is entertaining. It is well written. It is about a topic I really care about: community. The depth of Tableau's community is the inspiration behind the Best Of.... posts. Posts like this, and the others in this list, drum home to me that decisions made by the founders of Tableau have helped encourage and foster such a strong community."

To everyone who's featured in any of the Best of... posts this year: well done and thank you for your contribution. We'll be back in early January with a Best of... for December. In the meantime, keep up with the latest Tableau blog posts by following me (@acotgreave). If you want to see more user-based posts, check out the top guest posts that were on the Tableau Public blog this year.