In the example below, the label “Product Type / Product” would not have appeared in the body of the display as you see here. Prior to this release, labels were not included in the display for fields of data that appeared in the columns (as opposed to the rows).
It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes to reduce everything that isn’t data to a minimum and to make other simple changes such as orienting labels horizontally whenever possible. The visual appearance of Tableau was already quite good, but with this release they have managed to make them even better by following some of the visual design principles that I advocate (and Tufte advocated long before I did). I’m not going to review all of the new features of this release and none of them in detail, but want to briefly mention and describe those that I find most interesting. The features that they decide to include are not turned over to developers to code as quickly as possible with little direction they first go through a rigorous design process to make sure that they are implemented in the most effective way possible. Rather, they understand the needs of their customers well enough to discriminate between features that really matter and those that would take the product in an unproductive direction. They don’t just tick items off a features list that was composed from customer requests.
#TABLEAU READER COST SOFTWARE#
After recently being briefed on version 3.5 by the folks at Tableau, I concluded the meeting with the following statement: “You guys continue to amaze me with how many important features you’re able to address in each release, thoroughly and without compromising quality.” The team at Tableau succeeds better than any other software design and development team I know in identifying the most important next steps in the product’s evolution and proceeding through those steps expertly and thoughtfully.
I have reviewed every release of Tableau, beginning with version 1.0 and continuing now with the latest release, version 3.5.