Tableau Public – Data Visualisation [For Free]

Neil H — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 20:36:14 +0000

I’m a user of Tableau Desktop, a product by Tableau Software – it’s a great versatile tool for visual analytics, from getting a quick feeling of data trends right through to versatile summaries, and complex graphs. It’s always had a catch though, the pricepoint. [$999 or $1800].

It’s been used to produce some pieces of analysis on this blog, and I use it regularly for work. What’s great is that alongside their latest commercial release, is that they unveiled Tableau Public. This is a free version, that allows you to download the software, create your analysis and deploy it to their web servers.

You can then grab the embed code, and display visualisations on your blog; which people can then interact with. This platform takes it one step further than just a static image. It’s on par with IBM ManyEyes, but doesn’t use java and, to me at least, is much easier and intuitive to use.

The product has the same feature set as the commercial version, with the only limitations being a 100,000 row limit and restricted data sources.

So for those who have chastised me for using ‘expensive’ software before, don’t worry – you can have a go with one of the latest challengers on the block, as according to Gartner.

P.S. There is an obvious lack of a Tableau Public embedded chart in this post, that is because it does not support the Apple platform. Damn. Instead, here is one they produced:

Data & Stuff // Neil Houston » data analysis

Tableau Public – Data Visualisation [For Free]

P.S. There is an obvious lack of a Tableau Public embedded chart in this post, that is because it does not support the Apple platform. Damn. Instead, here is one they produced: