The Vision
Imagine if online data was as fun and accessible as online video. While most content types are handled gracefully on the web, data remains an obtuse mess. On the web you can create beautiful things with text. You can make images dance on a page. You can integrate video effortlessly. And yet data remains cumbersome, static and opaque.
How do you put data on the web today?
- Paste it in ugly lists
- Post it as a bunch of goofy files and catalogs
- Ask a developer to spend weeks creating a useful interface to it
Tableau Public is a new alternative. It lets you publish data visualizations to the web that are useful and beautiful. These visualizations answer questions and tell stories. You can publish one in minutes. Visit the Gallery to see how people are using Tableau Public.
The Technology
There’s a revolutionary technology behind Tableau Public called VizQL: A Visual Query Language. You don’t need to be a programmer to use Tableau Public. VizQL is all under the hood. But it lets us do what we do.
Learn why Turing Award Winner Jim Gray recognized VizQL as a breakthrough.
“If you have ever been frustrated when trying to plot a useful graph from a simple spreadsheet, you would appreciate the value of a system that allows users to create stunning graphs interactively.”
VizQL: A visual query languageVizQL has many advantages compared to existing methods for visualizing data
- VizQL is a computer language for describing tables, graphs, charts, maps, time series, tables of visualizations and dashboards. It unifies all of these different visual representations into a simple language.
- VizQL statements define the mapping from records returned from a dataset or database to marks on a visualization (drawing primitives). Some fields in the record are mapped to the geometric properties of the mark, including position, size and orientation; other fields are reflected in visual attributes like color and pattern.
- VizQL is a declarative language. The advantage of a declarative language is that the user describes “what” picture should be created, not “how” to make it. Even better, a declarative approach lets people build up amazing visualizations incrementally, in a process of stepwise refinement.
- VizQL is high performance. It scales to extremely large datasets.
The Company
Tableau Public is a product of Tableau Software. We make fast analytics and data visualization products. Founded by an Academy-Award winning professor from Stanford University, a savvy business leader with a passion for data, and a brilliant computer scientist, we’re trying to solve one of the most challenging problems in software – making data understandable to ordinary people. We’ve become one of the fastest growing software companies in the world.
Why are we launching Tableau Public? We want to help people put data online in ways that are fast, useful and beautiful. We want to improve public information, on the public web, for the public good. We’re starting this mission by launching this free service for bloggers, journalists, citizens, teachers, students, hobbyists and enthusiasts. Our hope is that this will blossom into commercial use by companies and governments. If you’re interested in discussing institutional usage of Tableau Public, please contact us.
