What is new in Tableau 9.0

There have been lot of changes in terms of usability or user experience in Tableau 9.0.

• Improved calculation editor
• Ad-hoc calculations
• New functions (like regular expressions)
• Data interpreter and cleanup tools like pivot and split
• Drag and drop analytic s
• Map Search
• New selection options (radial, lasso)
• Responsive tool-tips
• Formatting for Story Points
• Tableau Server
• Sheet Preview
• Color Picker
• Data Preparation
• Regular expressions
• Home Screen
• Speed
• Responsive tool tips  and More....see below.

Usability : As shown below the start experience has completely changed. On the left hand side, one can find options to connect to data sources and upgrade software options. On the right hand side, one can find new Discoveroption. It starts with link to How-to videos, shows the Viz of the day with thumbnail and other resources such as links to blog, sample data sets and live training videos. The middle section has the link to workbooks that one has recently opened. On the top-left corner, there is a button under File menu option, which quickly helps navigate between start page and visualization worksheet one has been working upon.

Let us say one has Tableau workbook open with multiple sheets in it. The new feature Preview thumbnailsreveal a thumbnail of the sheet while hovering over sheet names when creating a dashboard or story.

Analytics : A new Analytics Pane lets you drag constant line, reference line, box plots and other analytics right onto your view.

Tooltips are super responsive populating with new data for whichever mark one is hovering over in real-time in Tableau 9.0. In addition, the tooltip stays live instead of disappearing after predefined time as experienced in earlier versions.

Tableau 9.0 allows for creating calculations right in the view by typing in field names and functions. One can also use the new Edit in Shelf editor to modify the calculations in the shelf itself, and then preview your changes instantly.

Once the reference lines are plotted, one can select a subset of points and tableau automatically creates the new reference lines using the selected subset of points.

Data Preparation : Tableau 9.0 allows viewing just the metadata of the connections. One can quickly rename fields, hide columns and adjust data types. One can do split, merge and pivoting from the metadata grid itself.

Tableau 9.0 understands the data range and removes the extra titles, text, spaces, and images while reading the data. The pre-processing such as these can be done inside Tableau with the help of click of a button.

Data interpreter feature is supported only for Excel files opened through new Excel connectors.

Let us say we have an Excel file as shown below. One can see that the first row is not required.

When the same file is opened in Tableau 9.0, it interprets that there is something wrong with the structure of the data. Once the Data interpreter is turned on, it removes the unwanted first line.

Let us say that we want to convert the cross tab data into normalized tabular format. Tableau 9.0 provides Pivot feature to accomplish this task as shown below.

One can see that to begin with we had five rows representing data for five years for each of the seven states represented in the column. Once all the states are pivoted, Tableau generates 35 rows 5 for each of the states.

Tableau 9.0 allows split and custom split feature as well. Let us say for some reason you have data shown as below and you want to split the data contained in this one column to multiple columns.

One can use split feature to accomplish the same.

That is it for now but this is not the end of the features that Tableau 9.0 provides. There are lot many more features that are exciting in Tableau 9.0 such as Smart Maps, Statistical File connectors, Cloud and Big Data connections, new Level of details (LOD) expressions.

Refering From: edupristine.com