Sessions

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.

Get ready for another round of Hackathon presented by Netflix! This year aims to be bigger, better and heavy on the APIs. Conjure your creative juices and come hack away. We’ll keep your energy levels amped with snacks, drinks, and our staff of geeky cheerleaders. And don’t worry—if you find yourself stumped, our pro engineers are on hand for assistance. Doors open on Monday, October 22 at 8:00 AM. Participants leave with a sweet tee, and top placers nab all kinds of prizes.

*Award ceremony begins at 3:30 PM for attendees only

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.

At Tableau, we believe that customer engagement helps us build better software. Come hear how User Research, Pre-Release Programs, Forums, Zen Masters, and other customer engagement programs bring the customer experience to life within our development organization. Hear from our customers about their experience and see how customer feedback impacts Tableau. Walk away with a better idea of how Tableau uses your input and a process framework you might deploy at your own organization!

In a single year, Lumentum has established data analytics in over 80% of their revenue generating portfolio. By using Tableau Online, Lumentum reached over 30% of key executives, engineers, and customers within the first year; and doubled their user base year over year. This session will explore the continuous journey of transforming a company by connecting people with their data to drive a zero defect culture. We will present our story, supported by examples of tools and our own developed Tableau dashboards.

You will learn about:
- How Tableau enabled us to consume variable data sources, and produce a single source of truth
- How we utilize Tableau Online and Tableau Prep to make manufacturing processes transparent
- Why treating data analytics as a team sport enabled rapid change
- How to engage users by hosting onsite Tableau Day
- Tools and Expansion as we drive a zero defect culture as data driven community

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!

Toronto is Canada's most populated city and home to its wealthiest demographic, yet more than one in four children live in poverty. Raising the Village is an initiative that uses Tableau to mobilize and translate child well-being data. This session will highlight how Tableau is used to integrate data from multiple population-level data sources and display information by neighborhood, race, income and gender. Interactive Tableau dashboards are now being used by community organizations, governments, and policy makers across Toronto to support evidence-informed decision making. This session will also highlight the deployment of Tableau Online to support the increased use of Tableau for internal municipal government planning decisions, and will outline a long-term plan to build a culture of analytics for an important cause.

Are you considering migrating your data to the public cloud? Have you wondered about the implications for your business intelligence strategy? In this session, we will cover best practices from creating a foundation, all the way up to optimizing for performance and scale. We will also present several customer examples that demonstrate a successful transition to the cloud.

Apply a number of data level security approaches using Tableau Desktop, including data level suppression and masking. This session will discuss a number of best practices, including a hybrid use of Live Connection and Extracts, and data suppression techniques using calculated fields etc to ensure data is dynamically hidden, or masked as necessary for personally identifiable information.

A successful Tableau deployment involves more than creating pretty dashboards. Strong engagement at the executive level of your organization is critical and challenging the way that people think about data will be required. In this session you will learn about State Street’s journey from producing “reports” to leading highly-valued, quantitative and strategic analysis using Tableau. The speakers will outline their strategy for driving strong support from senior management and they will provide insight into how they have used Tableau to change behaviors and deliver measurable business value in an organization with over $33 trillion in assets under custody and administration.

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!

TC18 welcomes Ryan Sleeper, Tableau Zen Master, Tableau Iron Viz Champion, and Tableau Public Visualization of the Year author. Ryan is here to share why he strives to be a “master of checkers” by focusing on the fundamentals of data visualization. He will share many tips from this new book: "Practical Tableau." During this session, you’ll learn how to make beautiful bar charts, lovely line graphs, leverage psychological schemas to improve your data visualization, and more!

Instacart is building the future of grocery delivery, and to do so we must solve hard logistics problems every day. Our solutions to these problems combine machine learning, optimization algorithms and product experimentation. To make continuous improvement we need to quickly understand how our logistics initiatives are driving system improvement. In this talk we'll introduce our framework for measuring long-term improvement and share how we use Tableau to view these changes day by day.

Still maintaining your Tableau users and permissions by hand? Really? Well no more! We will share our experience at Pinnacle Entertainment of creating an automated method for enabling Tableau user access by individual employees across all areas of our Tableau Server projects.

The aviation industry is one of the world’s most complex network experiences. The coordination of assets and people - combined with a variety of external factors - can make it a unique challenge. The industry also puts you on a chair in the sky and delivers you home safely. Jordan Hefferan is the Director of Digital Services at GE Aviation, accelerating change and digital transformation throughout the ecosystem. His Tableau talk will focus on the transformation of the industry, the future technology landscape, and the connected aircraft.

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.

Join us for the Tableau administrators user group at TC18. This is an opportunity for you to connect with other Tableau administrators in the Tableau community. During this meeting, you'll have the chance to share best practices, connect with others, and learn new approaches to Tableau. We hope to see you there!

A common complaint regarding data analysis is simply getting access to the necessary data… What if the underlying metadata could be aggregated and made available to business users to increase efficiency, save money, improve data quality and most importantly derive actionable insights from the data analysis (rather than intuition alone)?!

Attendees will get a firsthand look at how Sony Pictures Entertainment is utilizing Tableau to aggregate disparate film metadata. This new tool assists operating divisions to make better data-driven decisions and enable collaboration to break down data silos quicker. Practical Tableau dashboard tips and tricks will also be shared.

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.

Want to see how Tableau can help your Sales and Marketing departments with Account-Based Marketing (ABM)? We know you do! Join your fellow Tableau enthusiasts along with experts from LinkedIn to share best practices and learn new tricks that can help drive your organization’s bottom line. In this Meetup we will have conversations on different aspects of ABM including measuring success, getting alignment through data, processes and planning, tools and technology, as well as ABM 101 for newbies.

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.

Providence Health is one of the largest healthcare systems in the US, challenged with delivering the highest quality of care enabling superior patient outcomes at the lowest cost.

In this presentation, Providence Health will present their Value Oriented Architecture (VOA) built with Tableau, to concurrently present and correlate the cost-of-care and meaningful clinical outcomes (“value”) using an apples-to-apples comparison across different providers. This enables a deep dive into the variances in outcomes and costs, and root causes thereof, to proactively address these and drive performance improvement. Learn how the physician-designers of the VOA partnered with clinicians across a 50 hospital system to create and deliver a Self-Service Visual Analytics platform for practice transparency and best practice discovery that is enabling superior performance and outcomes at a lower cost.

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.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) is the largest integrated healthcare system in Canada. This presentation will showcase the use of visual analytics to measure financial, operational, staffing, risk, project performance and employee satisfaction in the AHS IT department with 2000+ employees and $ 500 M in annual spend. Key solutions developed will be presented with lessons learned while creating a team, ingesting data from 90+ systems, and delivering 50+ analytics solutions in 9 months.

In 2017, there were 687 deaths related to accidental opioid overdose in Alberta. This presentation will also articulate how AHS is deploying visual analytics for crafting and disseminating actionable surveillance information to various stakeholders and partners, to enable a coordinated response to the opioid crisis in Alberta with measurable impact.

Learn how you can use Python in Tableau! We probably cannot teach you how to code in two hours, but we can show you how to use Python in Tableau to create amazing visualizations that would otherwise not be possible. We will show you how to install TabPy, how you can get Tableau Desktop and Server talking with a Python environment, and most importantly, how you can put Python code directly into your Tableau calculations.

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.

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".

Fan of all things Tableau? Join Fanalyitcs for the ultimate gathering of Tableau Public authors. Expect inspiring presentations, passionate discussions, and exciting data workshops. Drinks will be available to keep the atmosphere bubbly, but seating is filled on a first-come basis, so be sure to arrive early! 

Learn how a division of Home Depot is increasing customer experience and saving money by holding our vendors accountable using interactive Tableau dashboards and machine learning. Getting orders right the first time and produced/shipped on time is paramount to our customers. Exposing production times and other data to our vendors through secure, well designed Tableau dashboards, our teams are helping them achieve these goals. Our machine learning models help detect problem orders before they occur, alerting our teams before they get to the vendor, helping save production costs and improving customer satisfaction.

Stamford Health is a major teaching facility with outreach across Fairfield County, CT. It includes a 305-bed hospital and over 150 physicians across several specialties. With the creation of a centralized analytics department, Tableau was chosen as the enterprise-wide data visualization and reporting software. These changes helped improve reporting efficiency, organizational transparency, scheduling proficiency, and data consistency. Our dashboards were also able to replace several third-party vendors and avoid expensive consultant fees. Over the past few years, we have deployed custom analytics to the entire medical group organization, improving productivity, quality, financial, and operational performance. With the increased transparency into OR capacity and availability, we have empowered our staff and surgeons to deliver better care and our perioperative leadership to manage issues proactively.

This talk describes how evolution has equipped every person with the essential skills for seeing and understanding data. The core Zen is a cycle of visual analysis that helps individuals and organizations work more effectively with data. You will learn what psychologists, statisticians and others have learned about using the human visual system to work effectively with data, the fundamental principles for designing effective dashboards, and how to expand the use of visual analysis in your organization.

Does your company have a leadership pipeline that includes underrepresented minorities? Have you implemented programs to diversify your company’s senior leadership? Are you an underrepresented minority with ideas on how companies can grow current employees into leaders? Have a seat at the table and join us as we discuss the importance of diversity in leadership and share experiences that have led to success.

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.

Learn how to create your custom administrative views. Our developers love to make your life easier. This is why you have pre-built administrative views to monitor your Tableau environment. But we give you even more! In this session, learn to further monitor your environment by plugging Tableau Desktop into Tableau Server PostgreSQL, and uncover advanced insights.

Information overload is real. If glancing over your dashboard makes your eyeballs spin in their sockets, this session is for you. We’ll intro you to your new BFF: guided analytics—a design concept that helps you communicate more effectively via interactive dashboard navigation and story points. Learn to use the different types of Tableau Actions that allow end-users to drill down from summary-level data to more granular information. This session will teach you how to guide your audience with story points and encourage self-service data discovery through highly interactive analysis.

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!

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.

For those tasked with teaching your coworkers Tableau, how do you keep people engaged? How do you generate enough interest to overcome inertia with Tableau and get coworkers to try it out? How do you take someone from connecting to data to creating full blown, interactive dashboards? How do you maintain engagement over time? In this session, you will learn the five key strategies utilized by the FP&A department at Southwest Airlines to increase Tableau adoption, expand analytical capabilities, and make training fun for all skill levels. Southwest has tackled these challenges in the past two years, and is eager to see what the future holds with Tableau. We are eager to share our flight plan with you to help you reach your data destination ahead of schedule.

Why sit alone during lunch when you could chow down with your fellow IT professionals? Join Tableau's Michael Hetrick Tom Wasserman and Manish Agarwal, product marketing managers focused on supporting IT professionals like yourselves.

Tableau's mission is to allow users to ask questions of their data and see the answers. However, this isn't always as easy as it sounds. Where do you start? How do you translate a question that you have into a Tableau visualization so that you can see the answer? In this session, we will walk through some examples and build a framework for breaking down questions to see how the question can be translated into operations in the Tableau interface. We will work on understanding how the level of detail in a question impacts how you set up your data source, and the features you use in Tableau.

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.

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

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.

There is a constant need for viewers of Tableau visualizations to always have the latest information in front of them. This session covers real-word use cases, from updating a procurement database, to knowing the location of your commuter train, and explores how to complete the analysis lifecycle by keeping underlying data sources up to date. We will demonstrate how the data behind Tableau visualizations, using Dashboard Extensions and TabPy, can be refreshed automatically or be updated by viewers of the visualization.

Join this session and learn how to use Tableau to visualize Isaac Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation for objects of the solar system. From there, solve the n-body problem of classical planetary mechanics.

In 2016, Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) began an effort to develop standardized metrics for our highest leadership levels down to our 25 districts and more than 30 divisions. This session will walk through the bottom-up journey to improve the use of data, its transparency, and its delivery. Our story will provide the steps taken that led to our Tableau deployment, examples of our leadership dashboards within the pyramid framework, initial deployment lessons learned, and where the Tableau movement is heading. You will get a chance to see our public website with embedded Tableau visuals, and learn about the importance of governance, which is critical at the time of any Tableau deployment.

Are you a newbie in the world of Tableau Server management? Kick-start your admin skills with this stellar course. What we’ll cover: adding users, organizing content, setting permissions, and leveraging Tableau Data Server. What this course won’t cover: a deep-dive into authentication or APIs. Please come with a basic understanding of the Tableau workflow and some familiarity with the Tableau Server interface.

This session will cover how the Field Service Business Insights Team at Cox Communications leverages Tableau to create enterprise solutions and enable decision science. We'll discuss how to create decision enablement tools that drive improved customer satisfaction and better business processes by helping evaluate the current state, improvement opportunities, and improvement strategy. The session will include examples of interactive dashboard tools along with specific design elements and the impact they have on process improvement and transaction reduction.

Come engage with fellow government innovators and enthusiasts. This casual gathering aims to inspire conversations and connections among those in the government industry.

Looking to implement Tableau's analytics platform in your enterprise? Or are you currently managing Tableau Server on-premises and interested in making the leap to the cloud? This session will give an overview of the differences between Tableau Server and Tableau Online, and the factors to consider for making an informative decision. Discover all the features, from our fully managed SaaS service that empowers you to deploy Tableau at scale. Find out how to keep data fresh even if your data sources are still on-prem with Tableau Bridge. Learn how to provide a scalable analytics platform that is accessible yet secure from a member of Tableau’s own enterprise analytics team.