The Tableau 8 Beta was released to conference attendees last week, the beta program gets the software out to real world content producers and gives Tableau feedback on any bugs or last minute feature requests. Tableau do a great job with their releases, as each year they jump the competition in features and usability. Just a few of the great new features include:

• Treemaps
• Wordclouds
• Data blending without needing the joining field in the viz (this is great by the way!)
• Greater control over the content and formatting of tooltips including adding dimensions and measures that are not used in the viz
• Floating panels allowing unlimited arrangement of worksheets on a dashboard
• Quick Filters can now be set to affect select worksheets, rather all or one.

The list is far longer than this and we’ll be demonstrating some of the new features in our blog over the coming few weeks, keep an eye out. Here’s a viz that demonstrates a few of the features detailed above (not live unfortunately as Tableau Public is still v7):