Tableau releases maintenance updates on a regular basis – about monthly. Since Tableau connects to dozens of kinds of datasources, which are themselves constantly updated, it’s always a good idea to stay on the latest maintenance release for your Tableau version. (E.g. if your company is running Tableau Server 8.2, you should upgrade to the most recent 8.2.x – 8.2.8 as of today.)

But in environments with intensive change control requirements, it can be very useful to be able to find specific, relevant reasons for upgrading.

Two frequently asked questions in this regard are:

1. How can I find a listing of issues fixed between whatever release I’m currently using vs. the latest maintenance release?

2. How can I find which release had a fix for a specific issue?

The Tableau support website enables both these scenarios.

The release notes for maintenance releases are available here: http://www.tableau.com/support/releases/

Every version’s release notes are available using this URL scheme: http://www.tableau.com/support/releases/8.0.1

Let’s say you’re running 8.2.1, and the current 8.2 release is 8.2.8. To find all the fixes between, say, version 8.2.1 and 8.2.8, you can look at: http://www.tableau.com/support/releases/8.2.2
http://www.tableau.com/support/releases/8.2.3

and so on. They’re now all linked on the releases page, so you can just open them in new tabs manually, or you can write a script to download them.

But, what if you don’t know when an issue was fixed, and you don’t want to have to search a whole bunch of individual release note pages? Then, you can use Google’s site search feature, and specify the following site base:

site:www.tableau.com/support/releases

For example, if you wanted to search for release notes related to HP’s Vertica, you could do:

Or if you wanted to scope it to only show Vertica release notes from version 8.2.x releases, add /8.2 to the end of the site parameter:

Here, let me Google that for you.

Enjoy! Leave a comment to let me know if you find this tip helpful, or have other use cases for Tableau’s release notes.

Color is tremendously powerful in creating data visualizations.

Tableau allows you to create custom color palettes. And usually people do this by:

1. Find an image with the colors you want to use
2. Use an eyedropper color picker tool; select each color in the image.
3. Get the color code.
4. Open your preferences.tps file and write a line of XML by hand that includes the color code.
5. Repeat for each color.

But that’s old-school. One of my colleagues created a web app that automatically creates custom Tableau color palettes from any image.

1. Find the URL of an image with the colors you want to use
2. Paste it into http://www.tabpal.co/

Tabpal identifies the dominant colors and spits out custom palette information ready to add to your Tableau prefs. Done!

For example, say I wanted to make a viz about the history of Apple, using the color scheme of Apple’s old rainbow apple logo.

I fed it to TabPal. Here’s what I get:

TabPal grabs the top five colors in the image, identifies them, and creates the color-palette XML I need.

But, we’re not quite done yet. The Apple rainbow has six colors, so I used a web color picker (I like Colorzilla) to identify the blue color’s hex code — it’s #118ECE — and added it to the list TabPal generated, then added it to my Tableau preferences file.

Now I can make my Apple viz in six colors. Moof!

Interested in learning more? Check out this webinar on Best Practices for Using Color in Data Visualization by Tableau Research Scientist Maureen Stone. She’s wicked smart!

I like to listen to music while I’m working.

In fact, I like to listen to music all the time.

Especially good music.

Here’s some:

For anyone interested, I put together a 6+ hours Spotify (yeah yeah) playlist of my favorite tracks from 2014 (and still working on it).
posted by Lutoslawski at 1:06 PM on December 12 [4 favorites]

—–

NPR Music has put together a massive playlist of their best of 2014, Songs We Love.

That link above launches the groovy in-browser app, which lets you listen on shuffle, choose a genre, and gives you artist info, as well as other functionality. You can view the entire list here if you are more eye-curious than ear-curious.

In a somewhat complete Spotify playlist

.

Do you have multiple versions of Tableau Desktop installed on your Mac?

You might be beta testing the new version, but still need to work with a current version for production work. Wish you could just right-click on a .twbx and choose on the fly which version to open it in?

Well, thanks to Mac OS X, it’s easy. No registry hacking required. (Note that this isn’t supported by Tableau — it’s a Mac OS X feature, so talk to your favorite Apple Genius if you need help.)

1. Install multiple versions of Tableau Desktop on your Mac. Go to the Applications folder and rename each one with its version so you can keep them straight.
   
2. Launch each version at least once. (During first run, Mac apps do things like register with the OS.)
3. Right-click a .twbx and select Open With > Other…
   
   
4. Check Always Open With and select the version you want to add, then click Open. (The checkbox seems to be necessary to make the option “stick” in the Open With menu. You can change the default version at any time by repeating this step.)
   
5. Now, you can right-click and have your choice of Tableau version available at your fingertips.
   

Enjoy! Post a comment if you have any questions and I’ll do my best to answer when I get a chance.

(If your question is, “how can I beta test the new version of Tableau?” the answer is, contact your Tableau account manager and they’ll be happy to sign you up!)

Sometimes people refer to a Macintosh computer as a MAC – in all caps.

This is wrong.

Further, it is a sign to Mac users that you don’t really get Macs.

I’ve heard the argument that MAC is the correct parallel to PC. But this is incorrect; PC is an acronym for Personal Computer, while Mac is the short form of Macintosh, just as Dan is short for Daniel.

(There is a MAC acronym – Media Access Control. When you use MAC, that’s what you’re saying. But that’s not important right now.)

Don’t believe me? Check Apple. You’ll see they only ever use Mac – even when combining Mac with other words (Book) and letters (i).

So if you want to look literate to Mac users, don’t call it a MAC.

This is one of those things that is like USING ALL CAPS IN EMAILS. While it doesn’t bother some people at all, it really bugs other people.

(Of course, if you’re TRYING to troll Mac users, go right ahead! I know it’s futile to ask trolls to stop trolling.)