Back in January, I published a post on how to create a calendar-based view in Tableau. At the time, I mentioned that it had created some buzz within the halls at Tableau-central and that, in part, lead to an invitation from Christian Chabot, CEO, to participate in a new project they were working on.

Well, here is your first peek at that project – Tableau Online!

Essentially, it will allow anyone with Tableau Desktop to publish their workbook online and embed the visualization in their website.

Tableau Online is currently in private beta, but you can sign up for updates here, or click on the logo below the visualization.

Before we get to the visualization itself, here’s what I’ve learned about the project from Christian and Ellie Fields – Director of Product Marketing.

Christian says that the vision for Tableau Online is for it to be “the YouTube of information visualization…” which I interpret as the platform of choice for publishing rich, interactive visualizations online.
Additionally, during a recent discussion with Ellie Fields, I uncovered some of the more nitty-gritty details…

1. It currently only works with local data – basically you need an extract from any source locally on your machine in order to use the visualization with Tableau Online (in all likelihood you will upload a packaged workbook)
2. There have been discussions around an API so that data might be transmitted ‘over-the-wire’, but there are no specific plans for getting that done
3. This is a very early look, the hardware is still undergoing performance testing so be patient if you get an error with the visualization or it takes a while to load; and hey, leave a comment describing what happened!

What follows is a proof of concept based on the calendar view I had developed.

This calendar specifically, and Tableau Online generally is built on the new version 5 platform (there have been some examples creeping out on the Tableau blog). I’ve been working with the version 5 beta so let me tell you about the features from 5 that are important here. Sheetlinks and highlights have been repackaged – and improved – to a new function called ‘Actions’. In this visualization, the calendar filter for year is also applied to the small multiples sparklines below the calendar. This is now very easy to do compared to how sheet links work in version 4. Also, if you click on any particular day within the calendar, that date is highlighted on the small multiples below – enabling this is as easy as hitting a switch (which is basically what you do).

Many improvements and new options have been added to quick filters – but, so far, the biggest improvement IMHO is the addition of the search feature! (Although I wish that the Tableau team had built in direct feedback for when a search fails)

Here are some of the things you can do in this proof of concept.

1. Filter on Year for the whole visualization
2. Select a particular month for the calendar view
3. Highlight any given day in both the calendar and the small multiples by selecting a day in the calendar (you can also select multiple days)
4. Highlight a day in the small multiples only by clicking on a plotted point (or drag select multiple days)
5. Highlight a particular month by selecting the month name in the small multiples column header
6. Lowlight inactive days in the calendar for a particular product category by selecting the category name in the small multiples row header (you can select multiple categories by selecting one category and then either SHIFT or CTRL clicking another category)

The Tableau team and I have discussed many changes to this visualization, but we weren’t able to get them done in time for this post as each change currently requires extensive testing on the new platform, but those changes should be coming soon. Discussed changes include changing the color encoding to profit instead of total sales, and doing a daily sparkline only for the currently selected month and then bar charts aggregated by month for the rest of the months in the currently selected year.

What else would you change/remove/add to this visualization?

Finally, there will be a smattering of sneak peeks going up across the infoviz community so keep your eye on out here and the Tableau blog as those new visualizations go up!