Mobile BI - Data at your fingertips

Tableau 6.1 provides many new and exciting capabilities to the Tableau products. Tableau 6.1 introduces touch aware support for the iPad. Tableau Server views are now optimized to deliver touch experiences when accessed on devices like the Apple iPad. Controls such as filters, parameters, sliders, scrolling, and zoom & pan, are now specially built to interact with your fingers.

Interest in Mobile BI is growing rapidly and changing how users want to interact with their BI tools. With Tableau 6.1, we are bringing optimized support for iPad to all Tableau Server customers. This means that you will be able to use “touch” to analyze your data on an iPad. Controls such as filters, parameters, sliders, scrolling, and zoom & pan, are now specially built to interact with your fingers. This provides a nicer experience for the user by making the selection of items easier with a finger.

This touch awareness happens automatically when you access Tableau Server views from an iPad. No special authoring or design changes are required from your views and dashboards – they automatically work. This means that an author can create a rich, compelling visualization without having to worry about having to make changes depending on where the users will want to consume the information – on the web, a mobile device or an iPad app.

In addition to supporting touch in mobile Safari a new Tableau for iPad app, available from the App Store, connects to your Tableau Server to access views and dashboards. The Tableau for iPad app provides convenient support for accessing favorites, and recently viewed content. It also has an elegant interface to allow content to be searched and filtered by projects, authors, workbooks and views.

Since the touch experience is provided by Tableau Server and does not require any additional capabilities or tools, all of the capabilities provided by Tableau Server apply on the iPad. For example all of your security rules also apply to the mobile scenario. Favorites, Tags, Projects, Users are consistent regardless of the device used.

All you need to do to get the iPad optimized version of Tableau Server is to upgrade your server to version 6.1. That’s it. No changes are required to your visualizations. No additional tools to deploy. You will be able to consume the same data from the desktop, web, mobile Safari and iPad.

I highly recommend that you install the beta of Tableau 6.1 and connect to the server using your iPad to experience the new touch capabilities.