Sessions

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!

The small analytics team at Artisan Partners manages over 70 Tableau Desktop users and 370 Tableau Server users with minimal effort thanks to our scalable security model, training of business users, and monitoring via Tableau’s PostgreSQL database. Learn how to develop a successful self-service strategy and implementation plan that empowers users to ask and answer their own questions. Create allies among the business, IT, and data governance by providing transparency. Walk away with clear action items (and a pre-built workbook!) that are easy to implement.

Join us for a special networking opportunity to talk about all things security. Don't miss this great opportunity to connect with Tableau developers, ask questions, and provide feedback that can make a difference.

Official data source provided by IBM. Calling all champions—this is a showdown you don’t want to miss. Starring three contestants chosen as feeder competition winners, Iron Viz Championship unites them in one final match. Tune in to see each pitted against each other. Wielding matching datasets and Tableau Desktop, these finalists will race to make the finest visualization in the room. The ultimate winner walks with $2,000 (and eternal glory, of course). Doors open at 4:15 PM.

Let's make content audits suck less. Learn how Tableau's SEO team used Tableau Desktop to tell the story of our big, messy technical content audit. Instead of keeping our audit in massive spreadsheets, we shared audit visualizations and insights via Tableau Server, expediting stakeholder buy-in and motivating action faster than a spreadsheet ever could. By connecting to live data and publishing to Tableau Server, stakeholders had the opportunity to explore content performance in ways that industry standard SEO tools, like Search Console and ScreamingFrog, do not offer. This session will show off some of the dashboards we made, the data story we were able to share with our stakeholders, the changes this project enabled, and how you can start visualizing your own content audits today.

Why is the weather forecast always wrong? Are all shopping centres the same? Do bands always play the same set at gigs? How can we use data to answer these everyday questions you might debate with friends? That’s what two Zen Masters, Chris Love and Rob Radburn have been doing for the last six months. In this session, we’ll show you how we think-up questions, the tools we used to collect and wrangle data, and how we viz. And then show how we make sense of it all to provide an understanding of the data. Come along if you are looking for inspiration for your own Tableau projects, tips on getting agile and creative at work, or to see the world differently.

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.

Data literacy is a critical skill in the 21st century. We believe this new skill will change the world in the same way that literacy transformed access to knowledge in the centuries after the printing press. However, just having access to new technology is not enough. The printing press automated the publishing process, but that still required people to learn to read and write. Similarly, the broad availability of data and analytical tools needs a fundamental change in human behavior. Data literacy is not just about consuming and understanding data visualizations but more importantly about applying the genuinely human traits of curiosity and critical thinking to your data.

After the acquisition of the Hyper database technology, we shipped Tableau 10.5 with our brand-new Hyper data engine. This deep-dive talk sheds a light on Hyper's design philosophy and highlights the context in which the Hyper project was started. We use real-world analogies to illustrate how Hyper's core technology works and how it differentiates itself from other data engines and database systems. This session is not directly applicable to your daily work with Tableau, but lifts the curtain on one of our core technologies and provides food for thought on how the Hyper technology enables current and future Tableau customer scenarios.

Eager to install Tableau Server on Linux, but not sure where to start? In this class you will get hands-on experience spinning up your own instance of Tableau Server on a Linux machine. We will be installing and configuring Tableau Server using Tableau Services Monitor ensuring you get to utilize some of the brand-new features that are now available. Expect to learn best practices on completing the install, configuring Tableau Server on Linux, and migrating effectively from your existing system.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Have you ever been asked: - to build a pie chart with 100 slices? - to build sparklines that never decrease because partial months are perceived as tanking? - to label every point on a chart? - to replicate an Excel spreadsheet? A day in the life of an analyst is not easy. We often wear multiple hats and become translators for different parts of the business who often don’t understand data, processes, or even the business itself. In this hands-on session, Zen Masters, Pooja and Adam of TheDataDuo.com will walk through real-life business cases, including gathering requirements, building solutions on-the-fly, and delivering artifacts to our stakeholders. You will learn about techniques employed in our environments and how to deal with stakeholders that have limited to zero data literacy.

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

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

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.

To answer all the questions regarding movie performance from studios, Fandango has developed “Studio Portal” application, which is a collection of insights to be used by various departments within Fandango as well as External Studio. These dashboards give insights of how a movie is performing compared to other movies before and after release. We will walk you through our journey from inception to a finished product and its adoption.
You will learn about:

• Identifying the opportunity to build data products that solve for repetitive adhoc questions.
• Creating interactive and visually appealing dashboards.
• Packaging dashboards into a product that you can monetarize.
• How to inspire your customers to self-serve

In this session, we are going to dig into how to make data most relevant to you. Tableau is all about having the right people seeing the right data at the right time. You will be learning about the fundamentals of filtering, how and when to use filters, and potential use cases. Prior basic knowledge about Tableau Desktop user interface would be helpful but not necessary.  

With the explosion of sophisticated technology in the twentieth century and beyond, many female mathematicians, statisticians and data scientists are making essential contributions to human endeavors, from bioinformatics to spaceflight. We all know women who have shattered stereotypes, pursued their passions, and persisted even when things got tough. In this talk, I’ll share some of their stories and my own journey from college statistics professor to host of the PBS miniseries, “NOVA Wonders”. By bringing public awareness to the data-driven work we do, we can inspire the next generation and increase our Power in Numbers.

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

Zulily’s marketing success in recent years has been driven by serving an end-to-end personalized experience using advanced machine learning and data science techniques, from customer acquisition to retention. Hear how zulily increased active customers by 800,000 in 2017 by utilizing Tableau visualizations as a self-service tool, and how this translated itself into better communications with customers. You will learn about how zulily embraces discovery-based shopping, as well as how our marketing team built and continues to build a passionate customer base using data-backed insights.

The Snowflake platform enabled Logitech’s cloud journey with minimal impact on business operations. The platform acts as a big data fabric layer, and sources data for all of Logitech’s analytics initiatives from descriptive to prescriptive to predictive analytics, including NLP processing engines. Learn how Logitech:
* Built a hybrid data fabric to integrate and deliver information across on-premises and cloud seamlessly.
* Empowered business users with a symbiotic environment for rapid innovation with guardrails.
* Reduced TCO, such as infrastructure and operational expenses, while reaching exceptional service levels and ability to support a wide variety of use cases.
* Enabled Tableau platform to be real-time with minimal data extracts, and empowered business for advanced analytics.

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.

Are you curious about how Tableau Server scales in your environment with your workbooks? Want the skinny on the best server deployment configuration? Do you want to make sure your Tableau Server upgrade goes smoothly, or verify that the configuration changes you are planning doesn't adversely impact performance? In this session, you'll learn about TabJolt - A "point and run" performance load testing tool written specifically for Tableau Server. You will also learn about capabilities, new features in the latest version of TabJolt, and how to analyze your performance results to make capacity planning decisions.

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.

Applying real-world use cases, we will showcase example dashboards across key verticals such as: healthcare, government, finance, NGOs, retail, logistics, and telecoms. Join this session and see how Tableau users can find the value-add of location analytics beyond "dots on a map."

Do you want to create more engaging dashboards? Do you want your users to be moved by the data? Do you want people to remember key facts and information? Do you want to hear the tragic tale of a turkey vulture named Morongo? Then you need to know how to tell tales with data. When people think of data stories they tend to think of multiples vizzes embedded in a long webpage, but any dashboard can be improved using storytelling techniques. You'll learn, amongst other things: - Structuring stories - Identifying plots and characters in your data _ Applying the narrative arc - Adding drama with title and layout -Turning a dashboard into a story with story points

Already deployed Server on Linux? On the fence, but curious to know more? This meetup was assembled with you in mind. Come pose your questions to the Dev team that brought you Server on Linux, and meet others using Linux to learn or share your Linux Server journey.

With an organization of over 100 projects and an annual $2 billion budget, the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) Program Management Organization could not afford to be siloed in its approach towards making decisions. Integrated dashboards have brought together the financial, technical, and human resource community to rethink its approach towards evaluating investments, project planning, and implementing programs. Tableau has shifted the conversation from one project to a portfolio view and isolated cases to systemic issues. Tableau Server has enabled these conversations to occur at all levels throughout the organization. Access has expanded from a few to the entire workforce (e.g. headquarters and field employees). It’s served as a resource for responding to time sensitive requests from the FAA management team and external stakeholders (e.g. Congress).

Are you struggling to bring about change in your organization? Is your team or company stuck in entrenched modes of behavior despite your awesome data visualizations? What now!? Even as “a data company,” Tableau itself has wrestled with the very human difficulty of doing what we want to do. In this session, a member of our development practices team will discuss change management and behavioral engineering techniques that will help equip you to drive powerful and humane change in your organization.

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.

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.

The ability to enrich Tableau’s powerful visualizations with flexible, secure content has enabled Archetype Consulting customers to realize their own data exploration, insight generation, and constituent service-level goals. In this presentation you'll see Python integration via TabPy server, which can be used to invoke Python libraries for numerical computation, advanced analyses, and machine learning (e.g. Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, and Scikit-learn). Our Python scripts are stored as TabPy server endpoints for ease of use inside Tableau, as well as change management and migration between environments. We'll also share an approach to provide value-added content alongside Tableau Server, including high interest dashboard marks that drill down to secure content generated in real-time. This end-to-end framework for rich content delivery applies both to public datasets and enterprise environments.

Finding and accessing quality data has been an unresolved issue for decades. Data users of the past have accepted this mediocrity, but savvy Tableau users know better and expect more. Data marketplaces have entered the scene as a relevant and timely new trend that might just force the change required.

Join guest speaker Brian Hopkins, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester for an interactive session on a recent Forrester consulting study “Digital Is Driving the Next Generation Of Data Marketplaces.”* Brian will share results and discuss how:  

· 96 percent of firms believe timeliness and accuracy issues with customer data acquisition are big problems.
· Respondents experiences on inaccurate data can mean lost revenue and lost customers, but marketplaces can help.
· Data plays a significant role in digital transformation and the key to success lies with fresh and accurate customer data.

*A December 2017 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Pitney Bowes

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.

Are you tasked with monitoring a Tableau Server? Getting ready to upsize and want to ensure your IT toolkit has everything you need to monitor, test and troubleshoot? Ever wonder how TabMon differs from PerfMon, or when you should use Scout instead of Tabjolt? Heard about Logshark, but don't know when or why you'd use it? This session is for you! We'll provide attendees with an overview of some of the publicly available Tableau Server tools.

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

AI has created the single biggest technology revolution the world has ever seen. Clients need to be shown how they can accelerate and automate data processing and realization. Allowing AI to uncover the real opportunities that turn that data processing into business improvements. By using automation and virtually enabling visualizations with AI we can allow businesses to achieve their goals the right way— not just by sharing information, but by empowering the users with information so that they can achieve the goals.

Why and how do you use Prep to solve data prep? Join this introductory class to find out how to clean, shape and combine data the "Tableau Prep way". This means pushing on experimentation, using visualization and profiling to understand your data, and staying in the analytical flow. This class should be our equivalent to “Why visual analytics?”, where we show people why our visual perception is a powerful way to understand data.

In the last two years our Tableau user group at PepsiCo has tremendously grown, effectively engaging teams all over the world to solve their business requirements. We could not have done that without a comprehensive blueprint to share, communicate, and collaborate with all 17,000+ users. In this session, we will discuss how PepsiCo planned, implemented, deployed our current community, as well as share our long-term strategy. As a part of that process, we’ll talk about how we encourage best practices for dashboard design and cover a majorly successful use case where we embedded visualizations inside our global corporate portal.

The modern office of finance is using Tableau to become more efficient and improve the support they provide their businesses. Join us for a special networking opportunity to learn from others who have seen the power of Tableau first hand. This gathering provides a casual environment to connect with people with a shared interest and encourage inspired conversation. Topics will be selected by the audience with guidance from leaders in Tableau's finance department.

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.

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.

How many hours of valuable time have you spent recycling the same data in different configurations and combinations? How would you like to create a metric just once and be done? Find out Cerner used the JavaScript API and Node.js to allow five designers meet the ever-evolving needs of more than three thousand consultants and their leadership. You'll discover how we used cross-dashboard filtering in the API to dramatically improve performance and simplify data exploration. We'll talk about the business demand, data governance, and technology we used to create "Reportal" and invite our organization to build their own dashboards.

Wondering how to get the most out of your database when connecting to Tableau? What are best practices for Querying, Custom SQL, Extracts, Blending, Joins, Unions and Federated Joins? Join this session and learn on Tableau and Database Performance.