5.1 Release: New Graph Type, Better Publishing, Performance Improvements & Capabilities To Share Public Data

We're burning the midnight oil getting our website updated tonight (last night by the time you read this). That's because we've got a great new release for you, Tableau 5.1, that is loaded with ingenious features. For all the details, see our "New Features" web page.

Probably the most exciting new capability is the ability for Tableau 5.1 desktop versions to save your public data to the web for embedding in your blog and website -- all for free. The service is called "Tableau Public" and we hope you'll see Tableau visualizations popping up in your favorite blogs and websites.

We're excited about these capabilities to publish public data (or data you want to make public) to the web. People at Tableau are big believers in helping people answer questions more easily with data by making it more visual and more interactive. Instead of viewing static charts or tables, people reading a blog or website can interact with data and answer their own questions. It's a way a blogger or writer can give their readers exactly the content they want. If you want, you can even embed someone else's Tableau Public viz in your own blog or website. Or you can pull down the workbook file and create your own viz.

During our beta, we saw some great examples of people publishing their public data to the web:

• UNESCO is carrying interactive visualizations on deprivation and marginalization in education for dozens of countries.
• OECD showed the worldwide picture of labor force indicators by gender and age.
• The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) has made the Haiti earthquake disaster more understandable by visualizing healthcare points of service.
• Seattle Bubble blogs about the housing market in Seattle.
• Stephen Few wrote an article about Information Visualization, Design, and the Arts and created this Tableau dashboard as an example. I've embedded this one below.

Other great features of this release include

• Bullet graphs - a graph type invented by Stephen Few and designed for performance monitoring. In fact, Stephen recorded a special video at our request to tell you more about bullet graphs.
• Reference bands and extensions of reference lines - new reference band and line capabilities let you draw attention to key data points like never before.
• Rich formatting - format annotations, titles, tool tips, etc. with rich text formatting. Change the font, size, style, color and alignment.
• Reduced bottlenecks in Tableau Server - a number of performance improvements have been made all across the application including the initial loading of a view, materialized calculations, groups and bins on extracts, and an overall more efficient use of caching.
• New Tableau Server interface - a new interface makes it easier to use and to find views.
• Windows 7 support and more - we're officially supporting Windows 7, Teradata users and Essbase users will find improvements for those data sources, and built-in error reporting so we can learn about issues earlier and more easily.

I sincerely hope you're pleased with all the new features. Download your copy via our Customer Download Center or check out our free trial.