Sessions

You converted to named user, now what? In this session, we’ll go through strategies for deploying the conversion, and how to help users set up and manage their new named user model.

Want to control who is connecting to your Tableau Server and what they can see? In this session you will learn the various options for authenticating users, including local authentication, Active Directory integration, SAML, and Trusted Authentication. We will also dig into scalable strategies for managing user permissions and the prerequisite concepts required. Finally, we cover various approaches to control access to your valuable data, including user filters and row level security. This session is aimed at beginning to intermediate experience level server and site administrators.

Have you ever sat down to make a dashboard and weren’t sure where to start? Designing the perfect dashboard for your audience is easy if you have the right information. Professional Services Consultant Tara Morton blends techniques for establishing rapport by helping people clarify and address their business questions. In this session, explore how to come out of that pivotal meeting with everything you need to make your executives cry tears of joy.

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.

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

Join us for a special networking opportunity to engage with fellow DBAs. This gathering provides a casual environment to connect with people with a shared interest in SQL Server, Oracle, and other database systems as part of a Tableau environment.

Tableau empowers global users to quickly and effectively share data regardless of location, regional settings, or the language and locale format of their data. Join this session and be empowered to share data globally.

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

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.

Flex is ushering in the Age of Intelligence by delivering insights, cultivating ideas, and pushing boundaries. Through leadership in design, engineering and manufacturing digitization, Flex is on a mission to put supply chain management at the heart of a smarter, more connected world. In support of that goal, FlexPulse is a purpose-built platform which takes our supply chain data and delivers it in an insightful and actionable form. Join us to get an overview of our Pulse environment, its evolution, and how we partner with Tableau in our journey from data to Intelligence.

“My boss just dumped a bunch of dashboards in my lap and she says that half of them are broken. Help!” Has this happened to you? In this session, you'll see common issues that cause "broken" dashboards, along with a basic troubleshooting flowchart for fixing them. You'll learn how to locate formulas and filters that might be causing problems, and how to reverse-engineer a dashboard to make improvements, so it’s beautiful and useful for everyone who needs it.

Over the past number of years, our "Designing Efficient Workbooks" whitepaper has been a popular guide to improving performance. This session, presented by a student of the author, will cover the main causes of slow workbooks and offer practical suggestions on how to improve them. Expect to address topics such as defining efficiency (and why you should care), and diagnosing the cause of slow workbooks (via workbook design, the query, the data source, or environmental factors).

Starting out with statistics? This session is for you. We’ll launch from basic statistics (what they mean, how to access them in Tableau), then tackle creating box plots, histograms, control charts and more.

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!

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.

Ready to master the art of Tableau? In this session, learn best practices for visual analysis in Tableau, master some core Tableau concepts, and gain useful tips that'll ensure you become a data rock star. You'll discover more about preparing your data in Tableau, customizing fields in your data, exploring your data by asking questions and building views to find answers, creating dynamic views and filtering views, and building interactive dashboards.

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.

With annual US Healthcare expenditures surpassing $3 trillion, the industry is challenged with providing high-quality care at the lowest possible price. The Memorial Hermann Healthcare System is facing this challenge head-on. Through eliminating waste and increasing quality, we are changing the way care is provided. Come see how Memorial Hermann is using Tableau with Cerner to improve quality and safety of care, enhance the patient experience, while reducing costs.

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?

Are you an IT pro? Lean best practices for installing, registering, and licensing Tableau Desktop and Tableau Prep. Understand how and when to use the different authentication types.

Hiring great Tableau developers is one way to get results! What if you could motivate people to learn, keep them engaged, improve culture and coach them to build their skills?!

Motivating Science + Game Design = Making Magic Happen! 

Join this session to takeaway your own gamification program: The Tableau Quest.  See how organisations are using this learning framework, enabling people to build best in class viz capabilities.  Learn how to level up! Layering training, challenges and certification with tips and tricks to motivate, collaborate, and most importantly - have fun!

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.

By using Tableau you’re already gaining indispensable insight and transformative value with your data. Tableau’s capabilities provide limitless opportunity as the end user can discover, explore and share data asking and answering questions at the flow of their own thought. But, whether you’re an administrator, key stakeholder or end user, how well you leverage Tableau can significantly impact your success and long-term business adoption. In this session, we’ll explore how to fully engage with Tableau, provide you with a road map to data-driven success, use cases and introduce you to tools to ensure lasting value with your Tableau investment. 

Ever wonder about the prospect of employment after graduation? The British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT) integrates Tableau in forecasting labor market statistics for education programs. The main goal is to assist the decision-making of internal administrative concerns and the students’ occupation of choice. Discover how we use Tableau to: - Compare Provincial Education Data Warehouse to economic time series data - Use forecasting tools and key economic indicators to predict job vacancies - Analyze the data to internally make decisions to create programs - Promote our programs to potential students with Tableau by giving them access to job-to-graduate ratios, salary data, and occupation growth rates

Worthington Industries’ steel products are highly customized to end-user specifications. This high-mix, low-volume business makes price optimization using traditional methods difficult. Determining which products/markets to include or exclude from a given comparative analysis is often subjective and can lead to inconsistent recommendations. In our case, machine learning methods resulted in over-fitting due to insufficient training data. Tableau with R allows our analysts to test different market conditions using the power of predictive analytics (logistic regression) in a user-friendly environment. This tool represents the latest evolution in Worthington’s growing adoption of Tableau Server, deploying increasingly sophisticated features to our 50+ users.

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.

Over the past three years, our team replaced a custom-coded business intelligence tool with Tableau Server as the global backbone of our client data visualization and analytics platform. In this session, we will share our journey from a few Tableau Desktop users, to a fully deployed and adopted client-facing technology solution. We will cover technical deployment, cloud configuration/architecture, adoption and usage, and data feed integration strategies. We will guide you through creating a branded secure web portal, to publishing visualizations created by different software tools through Tableau Server. Ultimately you will learn how implementing Tableau Server allowed us to put UX and UI decisions in the hands of the front-line business experts and eliminate technical coding as the bottleneck to continuous product improvement.

Not sure what tool to use when you have a question about Tableau Server? Do you want to monitor, troubleshoot and maintain your server, but not by using your laptop? Then you need to build a utility server—loaded up with all of the Tableau support tools setup as a toolbox to understand your Tableau platform server. We'll survey the available tools and explore what they do and when to use them, then walk through the steps to get them to play nice on a single system.

You’ve enjoyed two years of speed tipping—courtesy of Zen Master Hall of Fame member Andy Kriebel and Zen Master Jeffrey Shaffer. Now join this exciting session and watch the torch get passed on to two new community members. Community all-star Lorna Eden and Zen Master Ann Jackson will take the stage and engage in an all new round of speed tipping. Andy and Jeffrey will be there to keep score and ensure a fair fight. Can the new challengers reach 100 tips?

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

Have you ever expected one thing but something else happened? During the execution of a visualization, it’s important to understand the order of how things get done in Tableau. During this session, we will cover the order of when things happen—from data source filters, context filters and top N filters, to table calculations, trend lines and reference lines.

Data is transformative, but it is also in inconsistent structures, in functional silos, and in incongruent models. As data sources and need for fast insights grow exponentially, its more crucial than ever to build a powerful data analytics solutions. Join us to find out how Microsoft Azure and Tableau come together to bridge the gap between data and users, by bringing massive amounts of diverse data into one definitive, trusted source for analytics and reporting that is accessible across an organization. You will learn how you can build end-to-end self-service analytics solution for all your data at any scale, with a fast, flexible and secure clod platform.

Tune in to Devs on Stage as Tableau’s developer team demos the latest-and-greatest, as well as up-and-coming features. First-timers, get excited—this showdown has nailed standing ovations year after year. Expect an amped-up audience, quirky devs, innovative demos—and (hold onto your seats...) the updated features you’ve been asking for.

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!

Tableau includes 24 out-of-the-box chart types in its “Show Me” panel. While these will likely meet most of your needs, there are times when you may wish to go beyond the show me panel and create completely custom charts and maps. In this session, Tableau Zen Masters Matt Chambers and Ken Flerlage will show you how to leverage the power of the Tableau platform to do just this. So, let’s go “Beyond Show Me” and delve into the world of custom charts and maps, the techniques used to create them, and the practical applications of the following: • Tile, Hex, and Area Tile Maps • Density Maps • Layered Shapefiles • Sankeys Charts • Mathematical Visualizations • Data Art

Unlike traditional printed reports, the Tableau Foundation's annual report is hosted in Tableau Public, which allows anyone to interact with the data and ask follow-up questions. The data even updates automatically every week—unheard of in the non-profit community! Join Tableau Foundation's Director Neal Myrick and Sr. Program Manager, Jason Suchumacher, as they explore how they built their annual report in Tableau. You’ll learn strategies for how organizations can move beyond the traditional annual report. Whether you're a non-profit, corporation, or foundation, you’ll walk away with new ideas and approaches for how your organization can share its latest information and cut the time and costs of producing a traditional printed piece.

So, you've deployed Tableau and have 100 users? Are you ready for that 100 to become 1,000 users? What about 10,000? Tableau is a great tool and can spread like a virus. Join this session, led by Paul—who’s grown his Tableau Centre of Excellence from zero to 13,000 users, while maintaining a solid, affordable deployment with an engaged user base and dynamic community. Learn top tips for scaling your service, such as: scaling your infrastructure, monitoring performance, capacity, organizing your team and support, and more.

Windstream’s Campaign Influence project brings together data from Marketo, SalesForce, and billing systems to provide a single source of truth across sales and marketing. Learn how the marketing strategy team developed a common language and measurable goals to understand trends and create an environment for agile business deployment decisions. Moving from manual spreadsheet reporting to automated, systematic updates wasn’t easy, but efficient design and strategic partnerships from inception to deployment resulted in a sustainable, effective, and time-saving tool. This session will cover the importance of creating consistency across departments with tips to get there, how to design for a range of users from executives to individual contributors, and clear concepts to capture marketing influence.

Data-driven decisions are paramount to thriving and growing in today’s business, government, and service environments. In this session, the Grande Cheese Company shares how to leverage vast resources of publicly available data from governments, non-governmental organizations, and commercial sources to augment and enhance understanding; leading to better business decisions. Topics include: - Sources and access methods to publicly available data sets, reliability and biases in data, and opportunities to use public data both tactically and strategically - Tableau demonstrations using public data from North/South America, Europe, and Oceania will focus on proper organization, presentation, and visualization of data and methods to restructure data within Tableau to make comparative analysis and glean understanding.

Have you ever wanted to build network graphs in Tableau? Are you interested in seeing Tableau connect to graph databases or visualizing relationships in traditional databases? Come to this networking opportunity to talk to the Tableau product team about your scenarios and the types of analysis you would like to do on relationships (graphs) with Tableau.

Visualization best practices are baked into Tableau by design, which makes creating beautiful, effective visualizations easy, but transitioning to such reports may not happen overnight. Moving incrementally can avoid jarring your audience with a complete redesign of familiar dashboards and the ability to iterate quickly can make Tableau a great tool for a journey to more effective reporting, but the biggest obstacle on this path is often the very first step. How can you migrate legacy reports to Tableau as literally as possible? Why is it so hard and what are some subtle enhancements that you can incorporate to slowly build support for better visualization?

As the demand for new dashboards grew exponentially, The Hartford’s Small Commercial Business Intelligence and Analytics Team identified a need for a standardized design that provides users with a uniform and cohesive suite of reporting tools. Investing in the development of a dashboard framework reduces new dashboard turnaround time while incorporating: • Consistent colors and design • Visual best practices • Corporate branding • Flexibility for varying subject areas Regardless of your industry or level of Tableau experience, you’ll leave this session with a heightened appreciation for the impact that branding and thoughtful design can have on the user experience. You will also be equipped with tips and tools to create your own dashboard framework.

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.

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.

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.

If your job involves administrating and configuring Tableau Server, this session is for you! We will introduce you to a brand new way to configure your server right from a web browser, using Tableau Service Manager (TSM). We will contrast it with the old way of doing this with tabadmin and demonstrate some new key features such as hot topology and hot configuration changes.

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.

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.

Join this session to learn more about each of the four different calculation types in Tableau. This session is designed for those who would like to take the 'analytics' in their 'visual analytics' to the next level.

Learn to communicate more effectively by using metaphor in data visualization. Metaphors help people understand something new in relation to something they already know. Whether literal or abstract, metaphor can help your users understand your message by using comparisons to tangible items like height, or abstract concepts like sound as the basis for more accessible chart communication.

We will walk through several examples of Tableau dashboards that use visual metaphors, and discuss what makes effective and ineffective metaphors. In this session, you’ll learn how metaphors work with mental models to help users understand and retain information, as well as how to tell engaging and memorable visual stories with Tableau’s out-of-the-box features by adding visual thinking techniques into their design process.