Tableau 2013 conference: ‘Data to the People’


We recently attended the 2013 Tableau conference, for those of you who weren’t there the tagline this year was ‘Data to the People’ – the basic premise being that in this era of big data new discoveries can be made simply by exploring and being curious about data.

With the announcement of Tableau 8.2 and its new feature set, including Story Points, the use of data to tell a story was one of the key themes at the event. Story Points offers users new worksheet/dashboards with mini-slides as story-points, helping to visualise the data journey from analysis of an initial situation to important and sometimes unexpected conclusions.

It was an extremely intensive and action-packed week, with an amazing atmosphere and over 3500 attendees from 40+ countries and 100+ industries. We met many interesting people, picked up some insightful tips, brushed up our skills on mark types, blending, formatting etc. and witnessed plenty of highlights.

One of which was the Iron Viz Championships where three competitors had 20 minutes working on identical datasets to see who could produce the most compelling visualisation. Ryan Sleeper, of Evolytics, took home the title of Iron Vizzer and $2,000, so a big well done to him.

Furthermore, there were some excellent keynote speeches, in particular from the Tableau CEO, Christian Chabot, statistician-forecaster / author Nate Silver and author Charles Wheelan.

You can watch the all of the keynote speakers here, which gives you a really good feel for the event.

 

We’re already looking forward to TCC14 in Seattle, where Tableau promises even more exciting developments in version 9.0 – we hope to see you there.