Sessions

There are endless numbers of opportunities and problems found in every company’s marketing data. Join us for a special networking opportunity to engage with others using Tableau in marketing and learn from them. The meetup will be in a casual and conversational. Specific topics will be chosen by the audience with guidance by Tableau marketers.

As the health care system undergoes significant change, the need for simplifying pharmacy data and finding actionable insights has never been greater.  Health systems need to quickly identify ways to reduce costs and improve revenue. 

Given the volume of data, our summary dashboards are essential to quickly identifying opportunities and then allow a user-determined path to more detailed data.  Integrating data from many sources allows health systems to identify high cost diagnoses, compare prescribers and identify drugs with sub-optimal reimbursement.  

While this approach produced the best user experience, it presented technical challenges to implement. We will share our lessons learned and challenges for implementing this approach such as using the JavaScript API navigating between levels of detailed data, maximizing performance and development efficiency.

Did you join us at Monday's healthcare meetup? If not, don't worry. This meetup is focused on engaging with fellow healthcare enthusiasts and sharing Tableau best practices. This gathering provides a casual environment to connect with people with a shared interest in healthcare and encourage inspired conversation.

At Marriott, the customer experience team uses Tableau to encourage data-informed decision making in business units across the globe. In this talk, Yinian Hou and Kristin Yanulites of Marriott will discuss how the team transformed the culture of data and reporting, drove enterprise-wide adoption and doubled the user-base within a year. Attendees will also learn about how to manage and scale-up the Server’s contents and data sources using the latest functionality from Tableau 10.5.

Have you heard about dashboard extensions, but don't how to use them or which are available to you? In this session, we'll show you five dashboard extensions that are available to everyone.

Join us for a rich discussion on important topics within the Data + Women Community. In addition to notable women contributors to our community, you’ll hear from customers and Tableau leaders alike about the challenges they’ve faced, the inspirations with which they have built their lives and careers, and—most importantly—how we can grow and succeed together collaboratively. #visualizediversity

In this session, we’ll share our story of how Pinnacle Entertainment quickly deployed Tableau. After identifying a key, under-serviced department, we were able to deliver dashboards and vizzes with action-driven KPIs at their fingertips. Now, as our internal Tableau champions, this team shows off new releases and features to the very people they were once requesting data from. Slowly, they are pushing our Tableau Trojan Horse through the gates and into the rest of the company.

Join Tableau Zen Master and MBA teacher and learn how to teach others to answer a business question using Tableau in just a two-day class. Expect a technique that mixes practice, theory and a data challenge. Learn ideal class structure, key Tableau concepts (and how they should be explained), and data visualization best practices.

Implementing Kerberos within an organization can be tough. This presentation will be a technical overview of the Kerberos protocol, including constrained delegation using an advanced internally developed database, BagelDB. This talk is complimentary (but distinct) from “OAuth on the wire.” Complementing the talk, “Kerberos on the wire”, expect to learn how OAuth is used at Tableau for data sources access. This will be a technical talk which will cover the HTTP exchange and concepts behind OAuth, as well as the implementation for key connectors.

There are many choices when it comes to chart types. While bar charts may seem “boring” compared to bubble charts, each graphic has its pros and cons when it comes to visualizing data. Given a business question, one may want to examine a relationship or look at times series data. A bar chart, while familiar, is actually structured in an efficient way for humans to compare length of bar, and thus rank items well.

This session aims to equip participants with a specific process to weigh the pros and cons, and ultimately, choose the right visualization to get the insights they need from their data. This interactive session will include real-world examples from professional services customers.

Ever wondered how to take inspiration from the Tableau community and put it into practice at work? Over time, Tableau developers at Chick-fil-A have learned a great deal from others (via blogs, social media, attending user groups and conference sessions). We often look to our Tableau heroes for examples of phenomenal dashboards and brilliant design. In this session, we will showcase some of the dashboards we've built at Chick-fil-A that were inspired by the community. Our goal is to highlight ways you can find tips, tricks, and ideas from others and apply what you’ve learned in real life.

This story-driven, Buzzfeed-style talk will introduce you to other real-life Tableau Server admins and address what makes them successful. We'll cover the best practices every admin should adopt to help them run their deployment smoothly, recover from problems quickly, empower their users, and maximize the value of Tableau.

Go big with Tableau! Are you planning to broadly deploy Tableau? Have you already put data in the hands of every user in your organization? Well this meetup is for you. Join your peers to network and exchange ideas for deploying at scale.

Take a journey and learn how to utilize one of the most powerful and useful features of Tableau. Sets! This session will help build a foundation for beginners, and then offer a fast ramp-up on the various methods for creating sets. Dive into the simplicity of elementary cohort analysis, learn to quickly visualize set membership, and reduce the drama in your everyday analysis while running complex comparisons among set members. Get ready to fall in love with sets throughout this training as we explore data in a variety of different places!

Oh Canada, Tableau customers unite. This session brings together truly Canadian customer presentations representing many of the geographies and sectors across Canada. Tableau success stands tall coast-to-coast so a great opportunity to network with the Canadian customer contingent at TC18 NOLA.

This session offers a brief overview of the new European Union General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) and shows you how use Tableau products to analyze, present, and store personal data successfully in the GDPR world.

Join this technical deep-dive into what Tableau Bridge does, how it works, and best practices for a performant, resilient deployment.

You've learned about actions and interactivity, but how do you truly implement a “guided analytics” approach where performance and user experience live in perfect harmony? This session will empower you to combine numerous techniques to create truly snappy and engaging dashboards that your users will love.

Customer Acquisition and retention are essential in the increasingly competitive world of financial services to survive. Through real business cases, learn how to leverage Tableau to better understand customers, allowing for quick discovery of commercial opportunities and hidden sale potentials.

In this session you will learn:
- How to better understand customers using visual analytics
- How to find undiscovered commercial opportunities quickly and easily
- How to find actionable sale potentials

This breakout session will explain the queries generated for different user scenarios, from a simple to a complex viz. We will also cover how caching impacts the query generation, how nested calculations, LOD calcs and published scenarios impact queries and their performance. We will go over the different tools available to study the Tableau query performance: Tableau Log Viewer, Tableau performance recording, Tableau visualization of logs, and ART tracing that we have introduced. In the process, we will cover how to narrow down performance issues, root cause to a particular visualization or quick filter.

Want mobile visualizations outside of Tableau Mobile? Have an existing app you’d like to juice up with some vizzes? This session will dive deep into Tableau’s open-source mobile app bootstrap. We’ll discuss the new React Native framework and how it enables web developers to write cross-platform apps. We’ll also cover how to retrieve viz images for offline use, the basics of authenticating with Tableau Server, and how to set up long-lasting user sessions. Common app pitfalls will also be covered, alongside tales of amazement…and sadness…from organizations who’ve worked with the mobile app bootstrap.

What happens when you combine a passion of sports with a love of data and Tableau? You come up with some of the most creative and engaging visualizations around and a community initiative is born. That is the journey that Simon Beaumont, James Smith and Spencer Baucke embarked upon in January 2018 when we were blown away by the increasing quantity and quality of sports vizzes being published to Tableau Public.

All 3 of us are avid sports fans; albeit it across a range of sports, but more importantly all 3 of us share a love for Tableau. In January 2018 we created #SportsVizSunday, an initiative to showcase sports visualizations and to create a sports visualization community, built around creativity and sharing.

In this talk we will share our experience of how we created our community initiative;

- How 3 strangers came together with a simple idea, and now have not only become community leaders in sports visualization but are also close friends
- Using Data Dot World as a platform to share content and promote community discussion
- Utilizing the outstanding Tableau community to identify others with a shared passion and, on a weekly basis, showcase sports viz content via Twitter using the hashtag #SportsVizSunday
- Developing a monthly sporting visualization challenge that has resulted, to date, in over 50 Tableau Public creations from across the globe and has achieved in excess of 5 Tableau Public Viz of the Day and 1 Viz of the Week
- What our plans are for the future and how we will continue to support people to not only showcase their talent but also learn from others

We’re thrilled to highlight best-selling author, Adam Grant, as our featured keynote speaker. The youngest tenured professor at the Wharton School, Adam’s new book Originals shows how new ideas can change the world—perfect for a conference full of data-driven truth-seekers.

Viz or treat! Join us at the TC18 user group meeting for a monster tip battle. Watch as eight powerhouses from Tableau user groups all over the world battle it out with their scariest tips and tricks. Round one contestants will have one-minute to show off their best Tableau tips and tricks. The battle will get bloody in round two when they have to showcase tips and tricks in different versions of Tableau, from Tableau 5.0 up to 8.0. In the final round, the last two contestants standing, will be given 10 minutes to create the spookiest of vizzes. Come find out who will slice their way to the top of the scare-board.

Are you looking to increase your dashboard views? Do you need one place to tell your story? Portal pages are a great way to keep your users targeted and engaged, while making Tableau the star of the show. This session will provide all the information needed to create portal pages within your organization. Topics will include: • KeyBank’s journey into portals • How portals have forced our analysts to become closer to our users • Getting started with a few simple tools (Tableau Server/Tableau API/HTML/Notepad++) • Designing your portals “like the internet” for users of all technical skills • Structuring your portals to be modular & scalable to create a similar look and feel • Best practices to make your portals shine

You've decided you want to up your Tableau game, and you think you could use a mentor to help you. Great! A formalized, focused mentoring relationship can accelerate your professional development no matter what your level of expertise, from absolute beginner to seasoned veteran. After all, you don't need to go it alone: a good mentor can be an advocate, a facilitator, a guide, a teacher, and a coach. But to get the most out of your mentorship, it takes a commitment and investment in the process—on the part of both the mentor and the mentee. In this session, you'll hear about the specific benefits of finding—and being—a mentor, how to find the right mentoring relationship for you, and hear mentorship success stories from the Tableau community.

Creating equitable territories for your sales team is critical to having a productive, efficient, and happy sales team. Join this session to learn how Tableau’s own sales operations team uses Tableau for the creation of sales territories. Learn about the process, beginning with valuing postal codes, moving on to compiling those into balanced territories, and finally loading territories into our CRM platform. In particular, you'll learn how we leverage the power of Tableau’s geospatial functionality to interactively create custom territories.

Product managers Jason Burns (from Tableau) and Tom Slee (from SAP) will jointly present best practices, and things you should know about using Tableau on top of SAP HANA for the best possible experience and performance.

As one of the thought leaders in Expedia's cloud migration, the Expedia Global Payments BI group architected, designed, and built a complete cloud data mart solution from the ground-up using the AWS stack and Tableau Online. In this session, we will discuss our technical architecture at a high level, and dive deeper into our methodology for transforming transaction level detail into a self-service reporting solution.

Implementing Tableau successfully is about more than just installing the software and setting up the permissions—it requires a strategic implementation plan. This session will describe the University of Maryland College Park’s experience implementing Tableau Server by creating an infrastructure that supports “controlled proliferation:” the gradual onboarding of new viewers, report writers, and content areas. We'll demonstrate our suite of solutions including our help site, our reports.umd.edu landing page, our report navigator, and our data documentation. As part of the demo we’ll discuss the strategies and tools we used to ensure an accessible, scalable, and usable ecosystem. Additionally, we’ll talk about our experience injecting outside consulting, training, and mentoring at crucial times for maximum effect.

Join us as we explore how to get started on your first project—and hit it out of the park! We'll share what has worked for us as a small team of users. Learn how to engage stakeholders and boost adoption, as well as other best practices.

Companies around the world are transforming their businesses by moving to the cloud. Considering moving your Tableau or data platforms to the cloud? Contemplating a next-gen cloud-based data warehouse? Join us for a hands-on walkthrough of key cloud deployment data points. The session will cover Tableau Server topics like improved High Availability and Disaster Recovery options, dynamic provisioning, and elastic cluster configuration. Diving a bit deeper into data warehousing, we’ll cover the basics and investigate topics like data localization, elastic computing, streaming, and multi-cloud solutions within data platforms like Snowflake, Azure, and AWS. Learn from InterWorks’ global consulting team as well as companies like Tableau who’ve made the switch to cloud. Take home key roadmap components and the top five most crucial steps you’ll need to know on your journey to the clouds.

Whether you’re new to Tableau Online or a Desktop user, this hands-on session ensures you leave with a fully established Tableau Online trial site (complete with Tableau's SaaS solution). Join us for a deep-dive into how to analyze your data, govern your info, add users, and share insights—all from the comfort of the cloud.

Learn how to connect to and integrate location driven datasets within Tableau to solve your business challenges.

Experience first-hand how easy it is to incorporate Pitney Bowes data into your analytics to:

• Layer industry-specific datasets on top of your organization's data for advanced insight
• Introduce new context to address complex business challenges
• Resolve data currency and consistency issues with ease
• Reveal hidden relationships between people, places and things
• Enhance native Tableau mapping and geospatial capabilities with additional location detail

Attend this workshop to elevate your analytics and address your company's needs.

State planners say that 2,000 square miles of Louisiana may be lost in the next 50 years due to sinking land and rising sea levels. Maps team members Jim Walseth and Ashwin Kumar will demonstrate how to use recently added and advanced map features in Tableau to reveal the threats in detail. Note: This session was Inspired by the New York Times/Times-Picayune collaboration "The Drowning Coast".

Data and analytics are core to GoDaddy’s ability to meet the needs of its diverse global customer base of more than 17 million. Tableau Dashboards are used to analyze data for everything from improving products to optimizing sales and marketing campaigns. The sheer volume of data available, coupled with the complexity of GoDaddy's cloud + on-premise data architecture, and the diversity of GoDaddy employees leveraging data, makes it challenging to ensure that analysis is accurate and well governed.

Sharon Graves, BI tools evangelist and a member of the enterprise data team at GoDaddy, will show how GoDaddy leverages the Alation Data Catalog in conjunction with Tableau to guide analysis while fostering a self-service environment where everyone is encouraged to leverage data to make decisions.

Learn how data catalogs tame data complexity and ensure accurate analysis, including:

• Activating data governance rules through new capabilities like TrustCheck and endorsements which surfaces compliance recommendations directly in the workflow of Tableau users and power analysts
• Tagging & tracking sensitive PII data with catalog sets surfaced through a user-friendly search interface that points users to the most accurate & useful datasets
• Best practices for leveraging machine learning to create and maintain a business glossary, ensuring consistent metric definitions across data sources

Why sit alone during lunch when you could chow down with fellow data geeks supporting the insurance industry? Join members of Tableau's financial services team at a reserved table in Data Village and connect with your peers.

Why sit alone during lunch when you could chow down with fellow data geeks supporting state and local government? Join members of Tableau's government team at a reserved table in Data Village and connect with your peers.

Currently uninspired by your dull-looking dashboard? Come put a visual pop into your day! This session ensures you’ll sharpen your formatting skills—no matter your current level of expertise. Learn what formatting tools are at your disposal, and various best practices for workbooks, dashboards, and worksheets. Over the course of the class, we’ll create a dashboard that encompasses the various formatting tools at your disposal within Tableau. By session's end, you will have a flashy dashboard that’s as efficient as it is eye-catching.

Our developers love to make Tableau user life easier. This is also true for Tableau Server/Online administrators who are governing small and large deployments. With the REST API, you can manage and change Tableau Server/Online resources (workbooks, groups, projects, etc.) programmatically. During this session you will learn how to leverage Tableau REST API, discover how to use an existing Python library to streamline and simplify REST API calls and learn to develop successful applications and script integrations based on customers’ examples. This session will involve hands-on coding in python and while samples will be provided and explanations offered, prior exposure to python syntax will be expected.

The perfect place for some geographic data is in the background—as a layer in a custom Mapbox map. Come prepared to talk about your data, and to witness a demo ranging from the simple to the most complex cases.

Ever wondered whether you can create something completely custom in Tableau? Have you come up with an amazing concept, only to be told it cannot be done? Do you feel like D3 and R are your only options? Think again. This session will demonstrate how to create custom charts in Tableau through math, data restructuring, and some Jedi Tableau hacking. Come along with three Tableau Zen Masters for an in-depth view of how to create completely custom visualizations. Attendees of this session will expand their knowledge of Tableau, learning the advanced (sometimes hacky) techniques used by these Zens to build innovative visualizations with Tableau.

Have you heard about the Extensions API, but want to see it in action? Do you want your dashboard to stand out amongst a crowd? Need to directly connect your insights to action, in the same view? This session will show you how to do exactly that. Tableau Zen Masters Chris DeMartini and Tamas Foldi will provide an action-packed demonstration of several Tableau extensions; enabling advanced visualization techniques and capabilities like Write Back. Each extension will be demonstrated live, with a quick overview of the build process. Attendees will gain a better understanding of how to leverage the Extensions API within their own environments. Take this opportunity to be the one who brings new capabilities to back to your team.

Are you interested in your dashboards and vizzes providing even more insight through NLG? Come to this special networking opportunity to discuss the power of narratives and stories built right into your Tableau visualizations!

Actions in Tableau put the interactive in Data Analysis! This session aims to provide a solid foundation for building rich dashboard applications and will cover best-practices for using Actions. At the end of this session, you will be able effectively consider and apply various interactive techniques, including action triggers and behavior within and across sheets. We’ll discuss: selection, filtering highlighting, navigation, and the *new* set action feature. We will also cover parameters, instant analytics, tooltips, and more!  

Get the inside scoop on developing dashboard extensions. What do you need to know to develop a dashboard extension? Is a dashboard extension hard to build? What steps are needed to build a dashboard extension? What are some of the possibilities of a dashboard extension?

Tableau helps people quickly analyze their data. But what if an application was designed with an incomplete understanding of the problem domain, and a data model doesn’t exist? In this session, we will explore how users can leverage Tableau’s Extract API to create data models. We will share our use-case—how we created one of the world’s first data models for analyzing patient continuous infusion drugs, as well as the five-minute version of how Texas Children’s Hospital is leveraging this data to better treat critically ill pediatric patients. Finally, we will focus on the nuts and bolts of the Extract API, review our use-case in detail, jump into the Extract API, and walk everyone through a step-by-step of creating their first data model.

We would like to showcase how Trinet uses the power of Tableau SDK and REST API's to provide the flexibility for creating Tableau data sources and publishing them to the server. Additionally, we will provide the power for business users to create their own data connections in Tableau without the obligation to understand the underlying, complex data structures and joins. Trinet has created a reporting tool for both internal and external customers that provides the self-serve functionality for building reports from pre-defined subject areas. With that, comes the need for better visualizations for these reports. Learn to utilize the queries and data generated by this tool, automate the creation of the data connections in Tableau, and publish them for users to build their own visualizations.

Learn from the personal experience of a people insights and analytics manager to discover how she enables easy user access to human capital metrics at AbbVie. The solutions implemented have led their team to a paradigm shift for business users—from depending on spreadsheets and analysts to provide data, to self-service through Tableau Server.

In this session:
• Learn about the prior state of HR analytics: security challenges, data access, manual calculations, and more.
• Learn the steps AbbVie’s people insights team took to: allow dashboard/enterprise access through Tableau Server, create a better visual experience to understand the metrics, allow drill down, tie up security challenges and create a single source of truth for their entire user base.
• You’ll see AbbVie’s people insights dashboard and a preview of the process that got it built and in front of the right users.

Table calculation or LOD expression? This session will provide you with a framework for making that choice. Learn about relevant parts of the calculation pipeline, performance implications, and the suitability for the scenario at hand. And, of course, you will hear real-world examples to illustrate each of these points.