5 Things You Will Want To Try Out In Tableau 8.1

Tableau 8.1 features new statistical and & analytical capabilities, allowing you to do more with Tableau than ever before. The Tableau 8.1 release date will be sometime this fall, so keep your eyes open.  In this feature we will be introducing:

R Integration:

R has always been a very popular language used by statisticians and recently it is the language of choice for big/group data users. Until recently, TIBCO Spotfire was one of the few visualization tools out there that could compete directly against Tableau and had R scripting built in. Combining R Stats with an interactive graph allowed for some powerful dataset analysis scenarios.

R functions and models can now be used by creating new calculated fields that dynamically invoke the R engine. This will pass values to R and the results will be visible in Tableau.

If you would like to know more take a look at this video:

Box-and-whisker plots:

A box-and-whisker plot has always been a useful tool to show distribution of data. Statistical outliers represented on a box-and-whisker plot are easy to identify as the groups around the quartiles are visible. This graph is now part of the options in the “Show Me” box in Tableau and is easy to configure and understand.

Tableau 8.1 Rank:

Rank before this required some data manipulation using excel or sql. Now it is an easy to use Table Calculation. You can customize the calculations with several options.

Two-pass Totals

My personal favorite is two-pass totals. Now the aggregation level for your totals can be different than the aggregation of the measure. What this mean is that you can have a cross tab showing you the sum of the values in the body of the table, with totals showing the maximum.

Prediction Bands

 

Prediction bands help your users to understand the variability that could possibility occur with your forecast. Having a better understanding of this in Tableau 8.1 will allow you to accurately represent your forecasts with confidence that it will not be misinterpreted by your users. Adding these new forecasting improvements under the hood of Tableau 8.1 will allow you to forecast multiple measures per pane to provide more verbose data for your users.