This post caught my eye both because, I use Tableau everyday and because without Google, I never would of found it.
I am a principle developement engineer at a large manufacturing company. I am often asked to solve problems that require determining the relationship and relative importance of dozens of design choices and or to tune a dozen or more parameters to optimize the performance of the system. While I am a good programmer, I am not a database expert. Prior to using Tableau I was using Excel pivottables or custom programs to explore the relationships amoung variables. This is a tedeous and time consuming process. I have also used Matlab, IGOR, and Origin where appropriate.
For a recent project the amount of data overwelmed my usual approaches. Not having time to reinvent the wheel I went looking on Google to find someone that had already solved the problem of exploring unknown relationships in large masses of multidimensional data. I quickly found powerpoint presentations describing Stanford's "Polaris" data visualization tool. The website stated that a comercial version of the tool was in development. I then emailed the project lead, Pat Hanrahan, http://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/
As he was on vacation, it took over a month to get a response. He pointed me to his start-up Tableau-software. They were just in the process of releasing a beta version. I fell in love with it immediately. I could for the first time, get an intuitive understanding as to how all the variables in the system were interacting. And in just minutes after collecting the raw data.
Tableau can look at datasets in the millions of records.
Excel is still limited to 2^16-1 records. Why? Could Microsoft adopt many of the features of Tableau? Sure. Will they? Not likely. Excel, after nearly 20 years of development, still does not have a decent default plot format that is acceptable to a scientist or is near publication quality. Instead they look like poorly drawn cartoons. So you are forced to use much more expensive programs like Matlab, Origin, or Mathematica to get decent Plots. Pivot charts are just that, charts. Not a real scatter plot of the data. I have seen engineers completely misinterpret data because they apply a trendline to a pivot chart not relizing that what looks like the x-axis is just a set of labels and the x-axis Microsoft accually uses in the trendline calculation are just ordinal numbers. True engineering data visualization is simply not the market Microsoft is after.
The examples displayed on Tableaus website are somewhat trivial compared to what the software is capable of. The true power of the software is the ability to explore many dimensions of the dataset all at once.
Edward Tufte stated:
"Graphics are at their best when they represents very dense and rich datasets."
This is easy to achieve using Tableau.
The company is very open to suggestions for improvements in the interface and in the feature set. They implemented in the first release alot of functionality I requested during the beta test phase. I have recieved two upgrades in the first year and an expecting another in the near furture. The President of the company visited and we had a great talk. I would love to give him example plots of my data for their web-site but I cannot as all the data is propietary.
Is Tableau software the next Google. Of course not. That is simply a stupid, idiotic statement obviously made to draw attention to the post.
But don't let that detract from what is a great piece of software if you have the right problems to solve.
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This post caught my eye both because, I use Tableau everyday and because without Google, I never would of found it. I am a principle developement engineer at a large manufacturing company. I am often asked to solve problems that require determining the relationship and relative importance of dozens of design choices and or to tune a dozen or more parameters to optimize the performance of the system. While I am a good programmer, I am not a database expert. Prior to using Tableau I was using Excel pivottables or custom programs to explore the relationships amoung variables. This is a tedeous and time consuming process. I have also used Matlab, IGOR, and Origin where appropriate. For a recent project the amount of data overwelmed my usual approaches. Not having time to reinvent the wheel I went looking on Google to find someone that had already solved the problem of exploring unknown relationships in large masses of multidimensional data. I quickly found powerpoint presentations describing Stanford's "Polaris" data visualization tool. The website stated that a comercial version of the tool was in development. I then emailed the project lead, Pat Hanrahan, http://graphics.stanford.edu/~hanrahan/ As he was on vacation, it took over a month to get a response. He pointed me to his start-up Tableau-software. They were just in the process of releasing a beta version. I fell in love with it immediately. I could for the first time, get an intuitive understanding as to how all the variables in the system were interacting. And in just minutes after collecting the raw data. Tableau can look at datasets in the millions of records. Excel is still limited to 2^16-1 records. Why? Could Microsoft adopt many of the features of Tableau? Sure. Will they? Not likely. Excel, after nearly 20 years of development, still does not have a decent default plot format that is acceptable to a scientist or is near publication quality. Instead they look like poorly drawn cartoons. So you are forced to use much more expensive programs like Matlab, Origin, or Mathematica to get decent Plots. Pivot charts are just that, charts. Not a real scatter plot of the data. I have seen engineers completely misinterpret data because they apply a trendline to a pivot chart not relizing that what looks like the x-axis is just a set of labels and the x-axis Microsoft accually uses in the trendline calculation are just ordinal numbers. True engineering data visualization is simply not the market Microsoft is after. The examples displayed on Tableaus website are somewhat trivial compared to what the software is capable of. The true power of the software is the ability to explore many dimensions of the dataset all at once. Edward Tufte stated: "Graphics are at their best when they represents very dense and rich datasets." This is easy to achieve using Tableau. The company is very open to suggestions for improvements in the interface and in the feature set. They implemented in the first release alot of functionality I requested during the beta test phase. I have recieved two upgrades in the first year and an expecting another in the near furture. The President of the company visited and we had a great talk. I would love to give him example plots of my data for their web-site but I cannot as all the data is propietary. Is Tableau software the next Google. Of course not. That is simply a stupid, idiotic statement obviously made to draw attention to the post. But don't let that detract from what is a great piece of software if you have the right problems to solve.