Tableau: Mondo cool data manipulation

I’m filing this one under gadgetry, even though it’s all about business.

Secret shame: I’m a pivot table fanatic. Love ‘em to death. They take all those incomprehensible rows of numbers and words and turn them into short, sweet, MEANINGFUL tables.

And yeah, I’m one of those closet data mining freaks, too. Give me 100,000 rows and 200 columns filled with numbers, and you’ve given me POWER…

Anyway, just tried out Tableau, a data mining and reporting tool that is essentially pivot tables on steroids. With charts. And I think I’m in love. I’ve used a lot of data analysis tools, but this one is really simple, drag-and-drop kinda stuff.

Tableau, which bills itself as “visual analysis for everyday data,” works with Excel spreadsheets or accepts data from most sources, i.e., SQLServer, MySQL (my feed of choice), Access, etc. You toss in the data, it registers and imports your info and field relationships, and then…you get to play.

There’s something really addictive about grabbing a row or column, dropping it into your workspace and seeing what the numbers look like. I kept coming up with all kinds of patterns I wouldn’t have suspected. And, ultimately, that’s the point of data mining.

Anyway…highly recommend this tool. It’s expensive–$1000–but if you’ve got a lot of number-crunching to do, it’s worth a look.

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