Sessions

Data is the critical foundation for every organization's digital transformation. To enable analysts to discover and understand where to find their most relevant, trusted data, catalogs have become the central focus that provide intelligent, automated and simplified data discovery and accessibility for all available data assets within the enterprise.

Organizations leverage Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog, a machine-learning and artificial intelligence-fueled discovery engine powered by Informatica’s CLAIRE™ engine, to increase the understanding of all enterprise data assets, right from within analysts’ familiar Tableau environment. Using “Google-like” search, organizations can find all types of enterprise data, discover relationships, and enrich metadata with business terms, crowdsourced annotations, data quality, and usage.

During this two-hour instructor led session you will enjoy a hands-on experience using Informatica’s innovative and collaborative self-service discovery solution. You will learn how a data catalog can work with your Tableau environment to take inventory of all data assets across your enterprise and help you democratize data with the right balance of enabling both governance and flexibility.

VizQL, the language at the heart of Tableau, ties together UI, queries, and a powerful mental model of data visualization. It allows users to build insightful vizzes and gives tools access to information for automated reasoning about the results. But that's just one example of languages that can allow for rich user input, optimizations, natural language interaction, and machine learning tools.

There are over 200 Not for Profit Organizations & Associations attending Tableau Conference this year. Join us for an opportunity to engage with fellow enthusiasts in the association world, share the impact your organizations have within your communities, and how data has played a part. Connect with industry colleagues to maximize your TC knowledge share and networking.

Tableau users are naturally more likely to adopt a dashboard if it feels familiar and customized for them. With so many options of how to format in Tableau, it can sometimes feel daunting to be assigned the task of implementing a seamless and repeatable corporate standard. In this session, you will learn how to create a unified look and theme across dashboards in Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and on mobile devices, without even needed a degree in graphic design. You will also learn how to provide templates for your designs to be reused by others. Finally, the session will cover how to customize your Tableau Server interface or use the Javascript API to take advantage of existing user portals.

As the industry leader and pioneer of mobile satellite communications, Inmarsat has been powering global connectivity for four decades. In 2016, Inmarsat purchased Tableau licenses for the business and paid off the entire investment with one simple workbook. But where do you go from there? The trouble with a six-figure ROI within 12 months is the expectation for better in year two. Come along to this session to hear how Inmarsat employees are building on this previous success story and see dashboards that are worth their weight in gold.

How can you use Tableau to make it easier for people to take action on the KPIs and data they're exposed to? This session will cover how to integrate applications like Salesforce into Tableau to make data actionable, and your users more efficient. The goal is to close that last mile of analytics where your users can use Tableau to actually impact the goals they're measured against.

The Tableau Community is unlike any other – our passionate members are why we do what we do! This is a chance to come meet the Tableau Community Team, Tableau Ambassadors, Zen Masters and User Group leaders. If you’re interested in starting your own User Group, want to learn what it takes to become a Zen Master or Tableau Ambassador, or just want to network with some of the smartest people we know, you won’t want to miss this meetup.

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

Last year at TC17, I outlined 10 basic steps, from data inception to decision point. Most of the feedback and questions I received were related to one step, “Communicate and Educate.” I realized that organizational change is a bigger issue that needs to be solved regardless of your level of planning, execution or delivery. While Tableau is Nationwide's current standard for data visualization, we have a lot of departments that are having a difficult time moving from standard reporting to visual analysis. I will share the three key areas we have utilized to drive organizational change successfully through most areas of the company: education, community and support.

Get an inside look at how Tableau runs their technical sales organization of over 300 people using Tableau products. A key to the sales efforts of any technology company is the technical subject matter experts that help a customer find the best solution to meet their needs. In software, this position is often referred to as pre-sales. At Tableau, we call this group customer consulting. Tracy Fagan, Tableau's VP of Customer Consulting, and his team, will share our strategy for how we use data to measure the health of our business and our products to stay on top of what matters every day. You will walk away from this session with new ideas on how to manage your team.

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.

Wondering when to use a calculated field, and LOD expression, or a table calculation? This session is for you. Come sleuth the right answers, and learn the principles behind applying specific methods to specific problems. You should have basic experience in table calculations.

Running Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Sage and/or SAP B1?  Imagine integrating all this data in to one set of Tableau dashboards for use across your business at a fraction of the time and cost of Alteryx. Stop imagining. Take a tour of ZAP’s pre-built Tableau analytics and see how ZAP Data Hub automatically integrates ERP, CRM, HRM and more in to one 360-degree view of your business. Without a data scientist or Alteryx server license in sight…  ZAP Data Hub: For businesses that want insight fast, without the data wrangling headache.

Have you heard of the Tableau Community but aren't sure how you (and your organization) can get involved, or even why you should? In that case, this session is for you! In this talk, Lorna and Sarah will utilize all 26 letters of the alphabet to give you an overview of the Tableau Community and provide details of how you and your colleagues can become involved. We will cover everything from blogs to community projects, and from learning resources to user groups. You will leave the session energized with plenty of resources to get you and your colleagues more engaged in the community, and to leave you equipped to build an internal community at your workplace.

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.

Enterprise AI is a target state where every business process is AI-augmented and every employee is an AI beneficiary. But what's really behind the marketing hype? Lot's of data science and machine learning! And it's not all being done by people with "data scientist" in their signature. In this talk, Kurt Muehmel, VP Sales Engineering at Dataiku, will share learnings from the field, describing how analysts with different skill sets and companies of different sizes have begun this journey. Some are farther along than others, and by making the right decisions now and avoiding stumbling blocks, you can to supercharge your quest to this AI-fueled future.

Tableau has been making a difference at American Family for nearly five years. Analysis of insurance areas such as sales, claims, operations, and customers are prevalent, but in this session, you’ll be taken beyond insurance at American Family. You’ll learn how we leverage Tableau in other areas like talent development, human resources, facilities management, and corporate responsibility. Functions like these historically offered basic reporting and few analytics experts on their teams. You’ll see how we've overcome these challenges using Tableau to measure, analyze, share, and improve the way business is done, making the organization, employees, environment, and community stronger.

In the past year, Cargill, a company of 150,000 employees, has dissolved its corporate, IT-centric, traditional BI organization. Now, Self-Service Analytics (SSA) is the future. We’re giving data back to the people. How do we succeed when the organization is scarred by projects, when learning analytics is perceived as expensive, and when everyone who gets introduced to Tableau replies, “I’m not a data person”? Good question, I’m glad you asked. Come to this session to find out how we modeled our community after Tableau’s. We’ll tell you how we were able to make data fun. You’ll walk away inspired by the tale of how we took SSA from rogue to vogue quadrupling Cargill’s analytics community and empowering thousands of people to uncover millions in opportunity.

Do you have dashboards that take a painfully long time to load? Have you been told that Tableau can't handle large data sets or that you need to pre-aggregate your data in order for it to load quickly? At IBM Watson Health we deal with large data sets that can exceed 100 million rows and have learned some best practices and "tricks" to help dashboards load and perform without the need of pre-aggregating data (and losing key functionality). In this session we will share our real-world lessons learned in tuning Tableau workbook for optimal performance.

This session is all about your geospatial questions. Members of the Maps Development team will be on-stage to answer anything you want to ask about working with maps, spatial data, or possible GIS workflows using Tableau. This session will give an overview of recent product updates and take a sneak peak at what is on the roadmap before opening the floor to you. Audience participation is required.

This session is all about maps and spatial data in Tableau. We'll answer some of the most frequently asked questions and then open it up AMA-style until we run out of time. Customer participation is required.

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.

Have you ever needed to create data out of thin air? Call it what you want: pad, scaffold or skeleton - sometimes we need to fill the gaps in our data because data that’s stored efficiently isn’t data stored effectively for the complex business questions we’re tasked with answering. In this session, we’ll explore how cross database joins and Tableau Prep can be used to make performing time-based analysis simple.

As part of our strategic planning, Shawnee State University has undertaken a major initiative to become a data-informed campus. As a part of this effort, there is a recognition of the strategic importance of enrollment management and student affairs data. Through a cross-campus partnership, the Enrollment Management: Matriculation to Graduation Dashboard allows us to drill-down from application through enrollment to analyze academic year cohorts, specific student group cohorts, student progress, and student-generated revenue. Shawnee State will illustrate the planning process, approach, and key components required for success and share: - Lessons learned in the dashboard process - Best practices, including WCAG compliance, when designing dashboards - Techniques for herding your team to success

Critics are abuzz about Tableau! The reviews are in and Tableau's a hit. In this session you'll get hands-on exposure to what's new, including Tableau Prep, enhanced visual analytics features and more. By the end of this training, you'll be an award-winner, ready to share skills with your cast back home. If you were able to attend last year's session, rest assured—we’ll be bringing you fresh content to get your hands on!

Natural language has garnered interest as a useful modality for users to converse with data and visualizations. Understanding intents behind input queries is a way of understanding a user’s analytical needs. In this talk, we explore how we can better address intent using principles from linguistics and visual analytics. With examples and demos from both our engineering and research teams, we hope to indulge you one (analytical) conversation at a time.

As seen in devs on stage, Tableau is bringing powerful new capabilities to interactive analytics in 2018.3. The new set action feature means you can design custom interactivity beyond filtering and highlighting. Now you can colour, group, hide, or filter a single axis with a selection. The applications are monumental - proportional brushing, benchmarking, relationship analysis, period comparisons, conditional aggregation, and single member drill down to name a few. This session is a must for anyone who has ever wanted dynamic multi select parameters!

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.

Come and learn how to integrate Tableau server with OKTA, one of the most popular SAML providers. In this session, you'll get to see us perform an end-to-end live integration, along with tips and tricks and troubleshooting steps.

How do I use data preparation to analyze my data deeper? Different data shapes unlock new forms of analysis. In this session, you'll learn how different data shapes make new types of analysis simple and fun. Find process bottlenecks by reshaping your event logs. See how your data changes over time by combining data snapshots. You'll walk away from this course with a library of data shapes and how to use them in Tableau and Tableau Prep.

In this session, Netflix will share how Tableau is a core component of making data accessible to as many people as possible at the company. A large percentage of the company uses Tableau on a daily basis to discover insights and be more data informed. With this, our self-serve user base is rapidly growing.

In this session, we’ll share how we are using Tableau “out of the box” and also describe how it fits into our overall data environment. In addition, we’ll describe how we expect to use the Data Catalog and Object Model, our explorations of large-scale data stores, and challenges we are working on including governance and data lineage.

In the world of marketing, big data is BIG! From interacting with brands on social media to the direct mail you toss out each week, marketers collect tons of data. But if you think visualizing and analyzing your marketing data is hard, imagine having to deliver insights to hundreds of clients. Learn how Merkle, an international marketing agency, overcame this challenge by combining the power of Tableau with big data in the cloud. We will walk through how we automate data integration in the Google Cloud Platform, visualize marketing event streams, and enable advanced analytics and attribution in Tableau.

Users make mistakes. It’s a fact of life. In defense of their own sanity and the stability of their service, admins often resort to draconian rules that end up heavily restricting the freedom of their users—removing much of the value of Tableau in the first place!

Join this session to learn a new way to keep your server deployment healthy and give your users the guided freedom they need to thrive with Tableau. We’ll go over two resources used internally at Tableau to automate the enforcement of best practices, ensure data quality, and help users who need just a little advice to get past an issue.

Two years ago, Swinburne University embarked on a massive data and visualization-led journey of change. What was delivered empowered end users, created trust in data and reporting and shifted the very culture of the university. The implementation of the Swinburne-branded Tableau platform, DAPPER, transformed the use of data at Swinburne. The business analytics team combined technical change utilizing Tableau and business change to create a shift in perception of both the data team and strategic decision making at work. DAPPER and the change that was delivered aligns beautifully with the new Tableau (enterprise) licensing model, echoing the access and enablement of the same groups within business settings. Swinburne’s business analytics team has created a proven methodology around the new way of working, extending the traditional data and analytics service offerings to empower the business.

Your organization is moving towards a model of self-service and that's awesome! But in your effort to give your team access to all the data they could possibly want, things have gotten... complicated. Learn some new tips and tricks on how to build in instructions and tutorials into your complex workbooks to help your organization teach themselves to have conversations with their data.

Tableau helps people see and understand data. These seven words create a fundamental shift in an organization’s approach to data, and along with it, change. While organizations prepare technically for this, often times we forget to prepare our most important resource—people. In this session, we'll explore the reasons behind people’s natural resistance to change, and explore the mind-set of your workforce. We'll introduce methods for addressing this resistance through the use of champions, communities, success planning, and more! By the end of this session, you'll have a better understanding of how to bring your teams from resisting change to embracing change and the importance of investing not only in amazing technology but also in supporting your amazing people.

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

In order to stay competitive, organizations are increasingly relying on data science to make decisions. However, small teams of data scientists may not have the bandwidth to meet the increasing demands of internal or external customers. One solution to this challenge is to combine the power of Tableau with the scalability and flexibility of the web. In this talk we'll demo a live web portal with embedded Tableau vizzes and data science models that users can query via parameters and visualize in real time!

This session goes beyond Tableau's R/Python integration by persisting tables of output from a model, leveraging the performance of a database, and supporting different inputs/outputs than the Tableau viz LOD. If you're interested in learning the building blocks and Tableau APIs required to make this a reality, then this session is for you!

In 1994, a few thousand runners participated in the first Walt Disney World Marathon. 25 years later, Walt Disney World hosts several of the largest races in the United States. A visualized history of runDisney events is presented to illustrate the differences in participant behavior compared to other similarly sized non-Disney running events. This session uses Tableau to investigate how the behavior of runDisney participants has changed over time and compares this behavior to select non-Disney events across the 25-year history of running at Disney World. Visualization enthusiasts will appreciate the advanced chart types, complex calculations and data manipulation required to create Tableau visualizations from publicly posted runDisney race results.

In one of the top-rated sessions for TC17 and TC16, Tableau Zen Masters Andy Kriebel and Jeffrey Shaffer raced the clock and counted Tableau tips. Andy and Jeff are stepping it up for TC18 and will be attempting 50 charts in 50 minutes. Don't miss this fast-paced and fun session.

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

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.

In this session, you will learn how to analyze metrics over different periods of time using advanced table and date calculations (e.g. for year to date vs. previous year to date comparison). You will get to know best practices for visualizing KPI's and actual versus target analysis, and how to combine these visualizations into a well-structured scorecard.

Founded and run by Tableau Zen Master Chloe Tseng, Viz for Social Good is a community project that helps mission-driven organizations harness the power of data visualization for social change. Viz for Social Good has been named a finalist in the Fast Company's 2018 World Changing Ideas Awards and was awarded a Silver at the 2017 Information is Beautiful Awards.

Join Chloe for a brief introduction to this initiative, then meet and viz with your fellow attendees on the latest project for Kevin Richardson Foundation to help change and reverse the state of Africa’s declining lion population. All are welcome, whatever your level of experience from absolute beginner to accomplished vizzer, just be sure to bring your laptops!

As seen in devs on stage, Tableau is bringing powerful new capabilities to interactive analytics. The applications for interactive statistics are profound. For example, identifying time series that are most highly correlated with a selection, cluster analysis applied to interactive outlier detection, baselining a stock’s performance against the market in general, correlating market value of players to their team’s performance in the World Cup, and tracking the turnover of (or time to resell) a selected cohort of properties. We recommend also attending “Ready, Set, Action” for an introduction to concepts applied in this session.

In two years’ time, Deutsche Bank’s Tableau adoption has grown exponentially. To support this growing demand and align to bank-wide strategic goals, Deutsche Bank set up a global Center of Practice. This session will walk you through the real-life story of Tableau adoption within a diverse global landscape; from its small beginnings to a dynamic and comprehensive phenomenon. You will hear from one of our Sr. Managers who spearheaded the initial launch of Tableau and how their challenges were met through the construct of the Centre of Practice. We’ll highlight our evolving solution to support enablement, empowerment and enhanced collaboration of our global community through informative intranet sites, interactive discussion boards, virtual classrooms / self-paced training, and business-orientated Tableau ambassadors. Learn what is contributing to our early success and what we plan to implement to keep the momentum moving forward.

How excited were you when we released Viz in Tooltip? Little did you know that you can take this beautiful feature much further than just inserting it in a tooltip. We've come a long way since its first release, and the community has done some impressive things with it. In this session, we'll teach you how to make your Viz in Tooltip beautiful, interactive, multi-levelled, drill-able, zoom-able, conditional and more.

In this session, you'll learn how to use Tableau Server open source tools like Scout and Replayer to perform basic acceptance testing and to measure user-perceived performance. We'll show you how to validate that your workbooks are still working, and that their performance hasn't regressed—after an upgrade of Tableau Server as well.

In the land of jazz, we go back to basics with Tableau Server. We look at its foundation and how it has evolved until 2018, with Linux availability. Like Louis Armstrong leading the way with his trumpet, Tableau Server is the pillar of the Tableau platform and a key part of the BI strategy for many companies. In this session, you will go away with advice on how to keep the bass drum of your analytics thumping along nicely. Learn how to plan your new server, its capacity and when to scale up. This is a session for jazz lovers, backgrounder investigators and Vizql tuners.

Do you have spatial data? Do you think maps are awesome? We do and we want to help you answer your spatial questions more effectively in Tableau. This presentation is framed around a set of common spatial questions (e.g. where is it, how far is it, how it is distributed, what is nearby, what is here, how does it compare to {location}) with demonstrations of our favorite practices for creative use of mapping and non-mapping viz features in Tableau. Join us to take your spatial analytics to the next level!

You’re comfortable with ratios and aggregation in Tableau—now you’re ready to stretch your brain and take on the next skillset. This stellar analytics track will move you from amateur to advanced with a lineup of period analysis methods via complex date calculations, nested logic statements, intricate string calculations, advanced conditional filtering, and more. Come learn how to get comfortable with multi-step calculations that will help you immediately in your business and analysis!