The Amazing Tableau Public
If you haven't come across Tableau Public yet I highly recommend you check it out. Tableau Public is a data visualisation service - with a twist. They also produce free desktop software which you can use to produce some amazing visualisations on the fly.
I've been fooling around with it for a couple of weeks and I'm amazed at how easy it is to use. Tableau Public essentially see themselves becoming the Youtube of visual data and I think they are on to a hot idea.
I've tried fooling around with Flex but it's simply too difficult for me to learn with my lack of programming knowledge. Tableau Public offers a good range of options for someone like me.
The desktop software comes in various flavours and the free version allows you to create charts and other interactive graphics from a spreadsheet, text file or Access database. The premium versions allow linking to other database applications and can handle very large datasets. But for the average amateur I reckon the free version is all you need.
The free version only allows you to save your representations online and they will be available for public viewing. But Tableau Public also provides embed code for your creations and those of other users, so you can see how this will become an incredibly rich resource very rapidly.
I'm still learning the ropes with Tableau so I won't post any of my work - yet.
But to demonstrate what it can do, check out the charts and so on below, which show medal performance by country in all Winter Olympics. It gives you a good idea of what can be achieved using this software.
I give it a big thumbs up. It has excellent potential for journalists and bloggers who want to represent complex data in an understandable way for their readers.
Give visualisation a moment to load....
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