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“Imagine if online data was as fun and accessible as online video,” said Christian Chabot, Tableau’s CEO and co-founder. “We created this product because we want to make data a first class citizen on the web. We want to change the way people interact with data online by letting them tell stories with flexibility and beauty.”

Those of you looking for a free data visualization and analysis tool and found Google Fusion Tables lacking have a new tool to check out : Tableau Public.

Already getting rave reviews from the folks in the beta, perhaps most notably Robert Kosara (eagereyes) who has been using it to visualize the massive Climate dataset released recently, it’s now freely available for the world to try via their website Tableaupublic.com. For some inspiration of how you can use it, check out Brad Feld’s visualization of his running data in the MIT Technology Review and the Funding Breakdown for the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation.

See the full press release after the break, along with a sample visualization of The 2009 Investments of the Top 100 VC firms, from CrunchBase data..

Tableau Launches Free Software To Make Data Social

New product helps blogs and web sites start conversations with interactive visual data

SEATTLE, WA, February 11, 2010 – Tableau Software today launched a new product that brings public data to life on the web. Tableau Public, available for free, lets anyone who posts content to the web easily create interactive visualizations and publish them to blogs, web sites, Twitter feeds or anywhere online. Instead of viewing static charts or tables, Tableau Public lets people answer questions and share data interactively on the web.

“Imagine if online data was as fun and accessible as online video,” said Christian Chabot, Tableau’s CEO and co-founder. “We created this product because we want to make data a first class citizen on the web. We want to change the way people interact with data online by letting them tell stories with flexibility and beauty.”

Current alternatives for sharing data online are clumsy. Typically, data is pasted into tables and lists, or posted as files or catalogs that are difficult to use. Available at Tableaupublic.com, Tableau Public is helping to solve this challenge – bringing data to life on the web for ordinary people. With its interactive visualizations and dashboards, Tableau Public helps people start conversations based on data that is useful, beautiful and shareable. No special plug-ins are required, all that’s needed to see and use the data is a web browser.

From bloggers and journalists to researchers and students, Tableau is already being used as a tool to create conversations with data. For example, Timothy Ellis at SeattleBubble.com, a community blog focused on the local housing market, is using Tableau to increase the depth of conversations about the changing real estate market.

Robert Kosara, Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina, recently used Tableau Public to compare temperature data collected from 343 weather stations over twenty years, or 77,172 observations. He was able to show warming trends clearly and posted a blog about global warming. “I was impressed how Tableau helped me create a more analytical visualization that was easy to share on the web. It’s an amazing product, and I regularly use Tableau for my Visual Analytics class,” said Robert.

Tableau Version 5.1

In conjunction with the general availability of Tableau Public, the company is also releasing today Version 5.1 of its Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server product suite. Version 5.1 provides more analytic richness, better publishing, and increased scalability and performance. Analytical features include reference bands that provide context to a user’s analysis, bullet charts to evaluate related data, and intelligent data labels to call out the most critical data. New publishing features include rich formatting, streamlined toolbar design, more filter options, and a flexible layout.

About Tableau Software

Tableau Software is the leading provider of fast analytics and data visualization software. Ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the 500 fastest growing U.S. companies and one of the 25 fastest-growing software companies, its award-winning business intelligence applications can be downloaded at http://www.tableausoftware.com/trial. They enable anyone to easily create and share interactive data visualizations, dashboards and analytics, and they can scale to organizations of any size or reach. For more information, please visit http://www.tableausoftware.com.