This is the revival of Shawn Wallwork's Weekly Forums Digest that he had started over a year ago. These digests were extremely useful to the Community, but it takes a lot of time - especially when working in the Tableau Community is not a part of your day job. And so I've decided that I will pick up the reigns and keep it going!

Community Initiative this Week:

The Crow's Nest Challenge took place this week and what an initiative it was! For those of you who are not familiar with the Crow's Nest, it is a central place where we can see which questions in the forums have not been responded to - and allows Community members who frequent the Community to start helping people right off the bat.

Several people (myself included) have tried to get the Crow's Nest to have no posts without a response in week, however, this is no easy feat. With inspiration from Shawn Wallwork, he lead the charge for making this a community wide challenge: Are You Up For The Crow's Nest Challenge?

And wow! What progress, we've made especially compared to the last couple of weeks. Our top 10 contributors (the last 4 listed tied for 10th) this far have been: Shawn Wallwork, Diego medrano (Tableau's new Community Global Support Engineer), kettan, Prashant Sharma, Joe Oppelt, Jonathan Drummey, Russell Christopher, Patrick A Van Der Hyde, allan.walker.0, Justin Emerick and Tom W.

Thank you to everyone who has participated!

Events this Week:

Joshua Milligan presented at a Think Data Thursday yesterday, giving insight on how he comes up with ideas on how to create Tableau workbooks that aren't the usual ways people use Tableau, some nifty tricks on formatting dashboards and some clever work on how to get a random assortment of numbers. If you missed it, definitely check it out here: TDT with Joshua Milligan on October 2nd

Most Talked about Thread:

. Tableautester brought up topic that got a lot of responses with varying opinions that lead to a good discussion and ultimately ended up with a playful talk of pie charts. Why is Tableau spending resources on Mac OS?

Stumper of the Week:

You know it's a tricky question when Jonathan Drummey and Dan Huff are having a hard time finding a solution. How to calculate sum of distinct values Anyone else have ideas?

In Other News:

• Joe Oppelt and Matt Lutton put together an awesome video on Sheet Swapping on dashboards: Re: We made a video of Sheet Swapping and Legend/Filter Popping on a dashboard.

• kris.linscott posted a cool way to make it possible to gather information from your Tableau users and post it into a Google Spreadsheet: Tableau Voting Solution + Google Spreadsheet Data

• Naquiyah Cash provided a detail response to Tracy Nihda about sharing workbooks with multiple users Generating and sharing identical reports with users with Reader (both Naquiyah and Tracy are fairly new Community members and they're already helping out by responding and providing feedback!)

• Back in February, Mary Solbrig created a post on ESRI Shapefile importer: R - she is continually updating it, and helping people, such as David Tanner

• caitlin.donaldson patiently went back and forth with Pooja Kapoor to solve his question and even taught him a couple things along the way: How to setup a quick filter for Annual/ Quarterly time frame

Thank you everyone for continuing to make the Tableau Community what it is. Have a great weekend!

As this is my first Digest - please feel free to send feedback on what you'd like to see more of or if you have any recommendations to include, please send to community@tableausoftware.com