Tableau Software has announced the general availability of Tableau 10.2, which adds advanced mapping capabilities to help make complex geospatial analysis easier, and simplifies data prep with new approaches to combine and clean data. Moreover, the company says, the new release will help enterprises deliver self-service analytics at scale.
The launch of Tableau 10.2 follows the November launch of Tableau 10.1, which added support for JSON, a direct connector to Marketo, web authoring improvements, more mapping capabilities, and new APIs.
Building on Tableau's existing mapping capabilities, the new Spatial File Connector allows customers to leverage their spatial data directly in Tableau for easy geospatial analysis. Tableau now connects to ESRI Shapefiles, KML, GeoJSON and MapInfo file types.
Supporting data prep, the updated product now lets people union tables from a database, leveraging database structure and schemas more efficiently. Tableau 10.2 can automatically recognize dates (there are more than 250 ways to represent a date) and make dates uniform with just one click, no scripting or complex calculations required. In addition, transforming data from a string to a date type is easier with Automatic DateParse.
Tableau visualizations can also now be made conformant to the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines drafted by the Web Accessibility Initiative, commonly referenced as WCAG 2.0 AA.
Tableau 10.2 provides fine-grained controls over guest access to help ensure governance, and also improves the connectivity with SAP BW with Single Sign-on support. Tableau can now support the security rules defined in SAP BW and ensure that users can only see the data that they are authorized to see.
As part of a continuing effort to make it easier to access data with new direct connectors to the most important web applications being used to run businesses today. In late 2016, Tableau added connectors to Anaplan for business planning data and Eloqua for marketing automation and campaign data. In Tableau 10.2 new connectors include Apache Drill and Microsoft SharePoint lists.
The full list of new features in Tableau 10.2 is available at www.tableau.com/new-features/10.2.
To download a free trial, go to www.tableau.com/trial.