I had a chance to attend the Tableau 8.2 Roadshow today at The Westin New York at Times Square. Even in the sub-releases of tableau there is always something interesting. As I’ve learned in working with it recently, it is easy to make a case study about how much time Tableau saves you in an on-going production environment. However, the learning curve is big as I try to ramp up on it.

Some of the features that they were presenting were: Easier Data Connections, Mapping Changes, Visual Data Window, Story Points, Tableau for Mac.

Overall the Story Points feature is by far the biggest bang for Release 8, so seeing demos and getting some best practice tips are a benefit. Right now it’s still a much talked about benefit, but we have not been able to easily integrate across our users.

Personally, the Mac demo hit home directly, since I do all my outside work on a Mac so this would make life easier, but the coolest was the mapping updates. Along with the new, more detailed maps, I sat in a break-out presentation where they showed how to connect our data maps to outside map feeds, like weather information, that could overlay our maps. This is one of those situations about ramp-up time, since we were looking at a new pitch for a sunglasses company and figured that it would be great to show results or make predictions based on the weather, assuming that more sunglasses are sold around sunny days, but learning how to make it useful will have to wait to a rainy day (see what I did there) where a deadline is not looming and we have some time to learn.