I found out today that we may need to wait another month for Tableau Desktop Professional for the Mac to be released, and i’ve been eager to finish off my statistical analysis project. I’ve collected 12 years worth of daily food intake courtesy of WeightLossResources, which splits out to calories, carbs, protein, fat and exercise calories – and is tabulated against weekly weight readings.

Google Fusion Tables – in which I did a short online course – can do most things except to calculate and draw a straight line, or exponential equivalent, through a scatter plot. This is meat and drink to Tableau, but which unfortunately (for Mac, Chromebook and iPad user me) runs only on Microsoft Windows.

I got a notification this morning that Amazon Web Services – as promised at their AWS Summit 2014 in London last week – had released Amazon WorkSpaces hosted within Europe. This provisions quite a meaty PC for you, but which you can operate through provided client software on your local PC, Mac, Android Tablet or iPad. There is also a free add-on to sync the content of a local Windows or Mac Directory with the virtual storage on the hosted PC, so you can hook in access to files on your local device if needed. There are more advanced options for corporate users, including Active Directory Support and the ability to use that to sideload apps for a user community – though that is way in advance of what i’m doing here.

There are a number of options, from the “Basic” single CPU, 3.75GB memory, 50GB disk PC up to one with 2 CPUs, 7GB of memory, 100GB of disk and the complete Microsoft Office Professional Suite on board. More here. Prices from $35 to $75/PC per month.

I thought i’d have a crack at provisioning one for the month, and to give me 2 weeks to play with a trial copy of Tableau Desktop Professional (i’ve not used it since V7, and the current release is 8.1). Within 20 minutes of requesting it off my AWS console, I received an email saying it had been provisioned and was ready to go. So…

 

You tell it what you want, and it goes away for 20 minutes provisioning your request (I managed to accidentally do this for a US region, but deleted that and selected Ireland instead – it provisioned just the one in the Ireland datacentre). Once done, it sent me an email with a URL and a registration code for my PC (it will do this for each user if you provision several at once):

 

Tap in the registration code from the email received, it does the initial piece of the client end of the configuration, then asks me to login:

 

Once i’d done that, it then invited me to install the client software, which I did for Mac OS/X locally, and emailed the links for Android and iOS to my email address to pick up on those devices. For what it’s worth, the Android version said my Nexus 5 wasn’t a supported device (I guess it needs a tablet), but the iOS version installed fine on my iPad Mini.

 

And in I went. A Windows PC. Surprisingly nippy, and I felt no real difference between this and what I remember of a local Windows 7 laptop I used to have at Computacenter some 18 months ago now:

 

The main need then was to drop a few files onto the hard disk, but I had to go revisit the Amazon WorkSpaces web site and download the Sync package for Mac OS/X. Once installed on my Mac, it asked me for my PC’s registration code again (wouldn’t accept it copy/pasted in on that one screen, so I had to carefully re-enter a short string), asked which local Mac directory I wanted to use to sync with the hosted PC, and off it went. Syncs just like dropbox, took a few minutes to populate that with quite a few files I had sitting there already. Once up, I used the provided Firefox to download Tableau Desktop Professional, the Excel driver I needed (as I don’t have Microsoft Office on my basic version here) and – voila. Tableau running fine on AWS WorkSpaces, on my MacBook Air:

 

Very snappy too, and i’m now back at home with my favourite Analytics software of all time – on my Mac, and directly on my iPad Mini also. The latter with impressive keyboard and mouse support, just a two finger gesture (not that one) away at all times.

So, I now have the tools to complete the statistical analysis storyboard of my 12 years of nutrition and weight data – and to set specific calorie and carb content to hit my 2lbs/week downward goal again (i’ve been tracking at only half that rate in the last 6 months).

In the meantime, i’ve been really impressed with Amazon WorkSpaces. Fast, Simple and inexpensive – and probably of wide applicability to lots of Enterprise customers I know. A Windows PC that I can dispose of again as soon as i’ve finished with it, for a grand sum of less than £21 for my months use. Tremendous!