17 March 2015

Tableau Public gets revamp as participation heats up

Source: Tableau Public gallery. Tableau Public visualisation of the world's largest stadiums. Interact with the visualisation here


Tableau has shared that 36,000 people joined Tableau Public in 2014 and published more data stories than ever before on its free platform for creating, sharing and discovering data stories on the web. Tableau Public consists of a downloadable authoring tool to explore and visualise data, a cloud platform to host, share and embed interactive visualisations and a learning program that provides support and training to hundreds of thousands of data enthusiasts around the world. 

A redesigned web platform has been launched and is now on open beta. Search has been rebuilt while the publishing experience has been improved. Maps are now searchable as well. Other new features include: 

· New profile pages: Dedicated pages for authors that enable them to edit and manage their portfolio of visualisations and showcase their work with others. 
· New Viz toolbar: Every visualisation comes with a new toolbar that helps people interact and explore their own view of the story. People can edit, download, embed, navigate, or restore views. 
· New resources and gallery: An expanded set of sample data sets plus a revamped gallery, and a curated set of the best visualisations of all time. 

Since its launch in 2010, authors have published more than 500,000 visualisations on Tableau Public – nearly half of which were published in 2014 alone. “We launched Tableau Public with the vision of giving people a place to express a new form of storytelling. We believe data is a great conversation starter that can be both emotive and rationale,” said Ben Jones, Director for Tableau Public. “We now have 90,000 of these world citizens who are helping us see and understand what’s happening around our world.” 

In Asia, visualisations created on the Tableau Public platform include one on dengue fever in Singapore created by David Murphy of Datasaurus-Rex, which allows users to look at the patterns in dengue fever cases and mosquito breeding habitats in Singapore. Another visualisation on the Indonesian Presidential Election 2014 by Rina Bongsu-Petersen was highlighted in Tableau’s daily mailer as a “viz of the day" when it was shared.

Download Tableau Public here

Read our blog post on how Tableau Public works here.