Tableau Public has only been out for 5 months, and today has released some of the initial figures on usage.  So far, over 4.5 Million Tableau visualizations have been viewed, gracing the websites of such major companies as USA Today and CBSSports.  To celebrate, they analyzed their logs to collect the Top 100 Visualizations for our viewing pleasure.

Among the Top 100, the most commonly viewed category is sports and the most interactive category is travel and lifestyle. Interactivity lets viewers explore the data within the visualization. People have created vizes on a wide range of topics, including worldwide alien abductions, the hottest U.S. cities for muscle cars and the all-time best basketball players.

Congratulations to Tableau for making the big time only 5 months in!  Full press release after the break.

Tableau Public Announces Massive Growth in 5 Months since Launch

Tableau Public tool helps data shine on the Web

SEATTLE – July 26, 2010 – Tableau Software today announced explosive growth in the use of Tableau Public. Launched in February, the company’s product lets bloggers and publishers tell stories with data on the web. To date, people have made over 4.5 million visits to web pages enabled with Tableau Public’s interactive visualizations, or vizes. This includes news sites like USA Today, blogs like Infectious Greed and websites like Maplight.org.

Using statistics based on both the Community and Commercial editions of Tableau Public, Tableau also released the first quarterly publication of the Top 100 Visualizations. These are ranked by viewing sessions and online interactions, and show trends across the group.

The most popular visualization is a fantasy baseball tier chart created by CBSSports.com. Creator Al Melchior was thrilled to be first. “The tool allows me to do so many things with data that I was never able to accomplish before.”

Among the Top 100, the most commonly viewed category is sports and the most interactive category is travel and lifestyle. Interactivity lets viewers explore the data within the visualization. People have created vizes on a wide range of topics, including worldwide alien abductions, the hottest U.S. cities for muscle cars and the all-time best basketball players.

“In just a short time, we’ve served millions of interactive visualizations to the public. It’s been fascinating to see how people have used Tableau Public to bring data to life on the web,” said Christian Chabot, CEO and co-founder of Tableau Software. “Tableau Public is becoming the go-to resource for telling stories to mass audiences with data.”

Tableau Public users concur with Chabot.

  • Cheryl Phillips, data enterprise editor of The Seattle Times wrote, “We want our readers to find our site dynamic, one that they can spend some time exploring. [Tableau Public] allows the reader to really drill down into their neighborhood, or into a topic, and that’s just another way of providing news they can use.”
  • For the blog Infosthetics.com, Kim Rees wrote that Tableau Public makes it “much easier for the non-analyst set to create excellent interactive charts.”
  • Chad Skelton, reporter for The Vancouver Sun, said “I’ve been really impressed at how easy it is to make compelling and visually appealing interactive graphics that allow our readers to really drill down to the information that’s most important to them. I’ve also found it a great reporting tool. Now when I get a huge data set, one of my first steps is to import it all into Tableau to start making sense of it.”
  • Mike “Mish” Shedlock, of Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis, commented “Dynamics views are more visually exciting. Moreover, dynamic maps allow people to key in on the local areas that they are interested in instead of assuming that everyone wants to see the same thing. ”
  • Tim Ellis of the popular blog Seattle Bubble, wrote “I really enjoy how easy Tableau makes it to turn complex data sets into easily understood visualizations.  The mapping feature is especially great when it comes to making sense of the local real estate market.”

Tableau Public lets people publish data to the web in formats that are visual and fun. Instead of posting static charts or tables, people can create interactive visualizations and share data.  Conversations start based on data that is useful, beautiful and shareable. No special plug-ins are required; in fact all that’s needed to use the interactive graphs is a web browser.

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 Tableau Public product can be downloaded at http://www.tableausoftware.com/public. 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.