UsableMarkets

Tableau, in a bid to capture some of the visualization craze that is driving sites such as Chartle.net and Timetric, has released a public, PC only, version of its software.

Having never used Tableau before, but hearing that it’s quite powerful, I decided to check it out. Here are the results, a simple scatter plot of US wheat production (million of acres per year) by price.

Price of wheat for millions of acres produced per year in the US
(full chart here, it seems to have been chopped off below)

My first thoughts are “what a difficult program to work with!” It takes a lot of wrangling to get the data to display the way you want it to. There is a training video, but it is relatively worthless, and just getting in there and playing around is probably the only way to really learn the program. So, in terms of ease of use, not so good.

The charts, though, are not too bad. And they’re interactive. I’m sure with a lot more time I could improve the look quite a bit, but what you get by default is definitely serviceable. There are no heavy grid lines, and in general the charts have a clean look to them.

The Tableau service comes in two pieces. The application, which one downloads and runs off the desktop (PC only), and an online component where data is stored and where one can share the charts they’ve created. The nice thing about this arrangement is that you get a lot more features than many of the online visualization apps, but you get the sharing features which actually make these programs worthwhile to use.

So, despite the fact that you hurt yourself just figuring out how to do some simple things (like pulling actual data rather than SUMs, COUNTS, etc.) I am cautiously optimistic that this could be a good tool.

~alex