Community Site Updates: Developer Forums and More

The hardest thing for me about working on really cool projects is having to keep them under wraps while they're still being finished.  That's why today I'm thrilled to formally announce a few of the really great things we've been working on in Community land.  More importantly I'd like to thank those select community members who bravely volunteered to give feedback along the way and in some cases planted the seeds for the endeavor themselves.  Many hands make light work and many brains make fascinating results.  For example:
Tableau Developer Forums


If you've ever wanted to roll up your sleeves and get creative with the new JavaScript API or maybe see if your C# skills are up to the task of creating an application for generating Tableau Extracts then this is the place to be.  Bring your coding chops and "what if..." questions.  No idea is too crazy and coloring outside the lines is thoroughly encouraged.


Tableau Calculation Reference Library


Looking for a single place to hunt for useful calculations?  Thanks to the fruitful brain of Tableau developer James Baker and a healthy dose of super users volunteering their time, the Tableau Calculation Reference Library is now your one-stop-shop for everything from Quantile calcs to Continuous Bins.  The best part about this library is that each of the calculations is a collaborative and evolving thing.  Commenting and editing abilities are a core part of this area ensuring that as the Tableau brain trust grows, so to will these reference materials.


Tableau Product Ideas Area


The ability to submit product feedback in our Ideas area has been around for a long time, but we recently made some pretty drastic updates to the page to increase the visibility of popular ideas as well as new ones.  We actually embedded a Tableau dashboard right at the top of the space to help people get a sense of all the great ideas that get submitted and how many of them made it into the feature list for our 8.0 release.

The last major update to the Community site I want to call attention to is a new area we recently rolled out called Community Canvas.  This one is especially important for me and Tracy since we're the people who are constantly agonizing over every detail of the Tableau Community space and are always eager to hear from people with feedback suggestions.  Community Canvas is the place to go with improvement recommendations or if you see something broken in any of the Forum, Ideas, Groups or Viz Talk areas.  It's also a place to talk about etiquette and conduct on the site itself.  It was important for us to have a dedicated location to have these conversations in order to make sure other areas could stay focused on helping people get questions answered and learn about being successful with Tableau.

As always, Tracy and I wouldn't be anywhere without the amazing and generous feedback from the Tableau community as a whole.  To everyone that takes time to make this an incredible place to learn, interact and make friends; thank you.