Sessions

Need to combine data from disparate sources? Scarier still—do you have data in spreadsheets, databases, and multiple other systems? Is it in the cloud? If reading this just amped up your heart rate, this session is for you. Learn basic techniques needed to bring data together (from all different data sources), and all within Tableau! There are no prerequisites for this session, but it’ll be especially helpful for users who bring a basic knowledge of the Tableau Desktop interface. Expect to master the basics of data blending in Tableau, an intro to cross-database joins, terminology, troubleshooting and more.

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!

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, the lights go down, the magic begins and soon, we’ll put a Tableau Server under our complete control. You'll see Tableau Server do things you've been told just aren't possible –and you may be left wondering if they really are.

Running Tableau Server on AWS? Don't miss these tips on how to do it the DevOps™ way! Turn your automation and monitoring up to 11 with this session. We will look at practical examples of how to: - send SMS alerts when Tableau has a problem - architect Tableau Server VMs in the safest way (using jump hosts) - automate deployments of entire environments with cloudformation (including the tableau server install) - run scheduled commands on the server automatically with SSM commands to implement a robust DR strategy and free your inner server-less hipster (and make your admin life easier) with lambda functions

Tableau's global corporate treasury team is the central bank of the company and is responsible for managing all aspects of banking services, cash and liquidity management, payment operations, foreign exchange risk, investments, ecommerce and corporate credit cards. This session will demonstrate how we use Tableau to manage a growing and complex global treasury.

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

Are you having a hard time getting executives to use your dashboards? Are you wondering why your interactive dashboards are not being utilized? Would you like to learn how to create dashboards that will give your executives the snapshot they need to manage their business? Come learn how to use Simple Text and Small Multiples efficiently in your dashboards. In this session, we will review lessons learned and best practices to create insightful and easy-to-read executive dashboards. You will learn: - How to approach executive dashboarding - How to use Simple Text effectively - How to reduce filters to maximize dashboard impact

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

VMware is one of the most innovative companies on the planet. We manage to stay ahead by understanding the needs of our customers and consistently exceeding their expectations. In customer advocacy, we are responsible for sharing customer insights throughout the organization. Tableau has allowed us to broadly disseminate these insights to make them part of every key decision. In this session, you will learn about leveraging Tableau to share insights from surveys, and also about incorporating behavioral data as a supplement to survey data for maximum impact. Best practices will be shared for NPS, Likert scales, weighting, filters, and stories—all with the goal of helping non-technical users identify insights that lead to improvements in the customer experience.

Ready for next level dashboard design? Join Tom Christian and Jenny Stancheva, “Viz of the Week” winning authors, as they share their views on how to create an engaging and impactful dashboard—from the ground up. You're bound to come away with valuable tips and tricks to bring into your own vizzes.

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 road to data bliss and success is a well-worn path thanks to tools like Tableau, but it's also a path filled with common pitfalls that are important to know about and avoid. This session will show you practical examples of what not to do, and how to know when someone else has.

Tableau's new set action feature allows visual representations of data to be used in calculations, creating a whole new integration paradigm that augments many of Tableau's existing capabilities. Proportional brushing, part to part, and part to whole comparisons are just some examples of common analyses addressed by set actions. If you have ever wished Tableau had dynamic parameters, this session is for you!

Tableau has allowed the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) to drive the power of data beyond our own organizational boundaries. Learn how DHS has successfully leveraged Tableau to improve client service delivery, policy development and client outcomes. We will highlight how Tableau Desktop has helped us better understand our clients, and how Tableau Server expanded the impact more broadly. We will share examples of dashboards that have created change within our organization, testimonies of the impact on the service delivery and details of how we leverage larger data and technologies such as Teradata and Hadoop to increase our impact.

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.

With our combined nine-plus years of Tableau experience, we’ve navigated many detours that we wish someone could have told us before we took them. Let our pain become your gain as we go down memory lane. Join us for this jam-packed session where we look back at some of the things that caused us intense frustration. We’ll journey from the initial request, to design/develop, and finally to operationalization. Throughout, we’ll demonstrate small simple tricks, as well as advanced techniques to elevate what you do know in the following areas: customer relations, data integration, design principles, and reporting operationalization.

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.

Back by popular demand—a top TC breakout session... Are you in a love-hate relationship with Excel? Frustrated and feeling like you're not moving forward? Bring back the romance. Let Excel do what Excel is good at. Move the analytics tasks you depend on and supercharge them in Tableau. This session will cover not only how to duplicate and improve Excel functionality in Tableau, but how to move beyond the constraints of rows and columns. Join us and repair your relationship with Excel. There's a happy world of dynamic, interactive analytics waiting for you.

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.

Come re-live the panic, relief, and triumph that forms the journey of discovering the unexpected in data. In this Jedi analytics session, you will see how to bend data to your will to answer hard questions. This session is a must for anyone who wishes to master calculations and data prep!

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.

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.

Are you fumbling around with FIXED calculations, hoping to gain some ground?  Using an NFL Football Plays dataset, this session will sweep through the syntax, prefixes, and practical use cases of LOD expressions to solve complex problems.  Gain tips and tricks to learn how to run all of the key plays needed to be an LOD MVP.

This session will demonstrate the intersection between science, data, and art, with a focus on our successes transforming raw disparate data into well-informed action enabling power with truth. Enrollment management, institutional analytics and financial planning offices at UB converge to progress the visibility of our strategic UB 2020 plan and enhance the academic mission. Collaboratively and methodically, institutional leadership expanded access to actionable intelligence and new insights to a wider campus audience using Tableau Server. As a result, we were able to positively influence campus leadership on future investment initiatives, increase access to intelligence throughout all layers of the university, and create predictive analytics tools to demonstrate the transformative power of data for tomorrow, not just today.

Do you ever look at a dashboard, gather insights, then open a business application to action? Do you want to bridge the gap between consuming data and acting on what the data is telling us, without waiting for deployment of the Extensions API? The Nationwide Claims department is using Tableau to assist not only leaders but associates, providing a platform to gain insights and act directly within our dashboards. Learn how we are using Tableau to help put lives back together after a claim and increase associate efficiency, using dashboard actions that interact with our claim handling systems. We will discuss: - Design and implementation strategy - Step-by-step integration of a Tableau dashboard into Guidewire’s ClaimCenter - Lessons learned

The volume and variety of data has increased dramatically as Ramsey Solutions has transitioned from a primarily analog company to a digital one. However, our existing reporting tools left access to that data in the hands of very few people. Wanting to change this and knowing that we had budget restrictions, we deployed Tableau Online. Leveraging a phased approach, proved to be successful as the buzz around using data for decision-making has never been higher. Learn about our journey through the peaks and valleys of introducing Tableau Desktop and Online to our company. We’ll share practical things that worked and minefields to avoid when deploying Tableau.

Dashboard Extensions enable Tableau to do new things and become even more powerful. In this session, we will introduce what extensions are and talk about how you can start developing your own. We’ll also give lots of demos that show the breadth of use cases for extensions by taking action on an insight discovered, adding new functionality to dashboard, implementing custom write-back, and more.

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

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.

Fan of all things Tableau? Join Fanalyitcs for the ultimate gathering of Tableau Public authors. Expect presentations, group viz building, and (of course) a data-centric Meetup. Seating is filled on a first-come basis, and room is limited, so be sure to arrive early!

Consider this a quick-start program designed for firms that want to provide a more structured educational framework for end-users to learn the critical skills necessary to see and understand their data (with little administrative burden). The program is designed to be customizable by role with plug-and-play modules. Firms will be able to immediately begin capturing valuable data about their end-users’ abilities and begin building a self-service community by connecting users with peers at the same level and with Tableau champions.

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.

Come and join us for a full day of hacking and unleash your creativity with Tableau’s newest APIs! You’ll have access to Tableau engineers, get a peek at the latest features, and have a chance to win a cash prize and eternal bragging rights. Whether you already have a team or want to join up with other hackers, all Tableau Conference attendees are welcome to join!

If you want the skinny on what’s going down at the conference, this is the place to be. We’ll let you in on some of the can’t-miss conference moments, provide guidance on selecting sessions, and provide tons of details designed to help you get the most out of your TC experience.

Transportation benefits are one way for companies to differentiate themselves in recruiting great talent. Using our own HR survey data, we were able to derive valuable insights into employee commute behavior and design a more effective transportation program. Expanding beyond our own internal initiative, Tableau has partnered with the City of Seattle and the Washington State Department of Transportation to help companies analyze employee commute behavior and benchmark their program against other employers. Cities like Seattle are experiencing unprecedented growth and increasing traffic congestion, and employers that are able to tailor their commute programs to meet their employees’ needs will be more successful in employee retention. Come learn how Tableau enables employers and cities to solve a shared problem with data.

Calling all business-minded brainiacs. For those who’ve pondered insights such as “How does one department’s percentage contribution compare to total revenue?” or “How did one division's contribution change over time?”, this session is for you. Acquire deeper analysis abilities via Table Calculations We’ll run you through the basics—how they work, when to use them, why they’re helpful, etc. Attendees should be able to write basic calculations and build basic visualizations for this session.

Ideal for site and server admins, this session covers job management features coming out this year. Learn how to better enable users via customized schedules, and regain piece of mind.

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

We're surrounded by statistics. Many sources use statistics in their message to add authority, conflate and confuse its audience. With updated content using examples from current media, this session aims to highlight common misuses of data, visualization and statistics and arm you against bias and improper conclusions, and inform you with such techniques should you wish to succumb to the dark side…

In a world of digital disruption, staying ahead of competition has never been more paramount to the success of an organization. That's why at Mars, exciting technological initiatives have been implemented to derive deep insights from data through analytics. Using a modern business intelligence and analytics approach, Mars moved forward with the concept of self-service analytics using Tableau in the Microsoft Azure Cloud as the preferred tool. In this session, attendees will learn how our self-service analytics approach empowered our associates with governed data, an easy-to-use tool, and training in order to develop an active community, able to unlock value from their data themselves.

The world of data is expanding rapidly, and change is coming. Analysts and businesses around the world are realizing our roles and use of data are evolving, and we must evolve with it. This presentation addresses recent headlines on data and the impact these concerns can have on the modern business model. Learn skills to identify what's happening within your own internal systems and be empowered to address them individually. Learn how to be more pro-active in your data strategy, how to identify potential risks and the effects that they can have if not addressed. Ideal for BI administrators, execs, and analysts looking to understand the role of data ethics.

This session will talk about JDBC connectors in Tableau which include Athena (first official one), Oracle, Presto and Generic JDBC (dev in progress). This session will also cover how to enable connecting through JDBC, explore what the customizable capabilities are that can be set to tweak performance, and learn what the pros and cons of VS ODBC are.

This session walks through real-world testing scenarios for Tableau Server. We’ll explain how we use the flexibility of public cloud platforms (primarily AWS) to design and execute Server performance testing that can help users predict how their deployments will operate at scale. We will address general Server performance as well as targeting specific processes, like Hyper. The session will focus on specific testing scenarios we have used internally, to offer a template for Tableau users to follow when designing their own enterprise testing and deployments.

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.

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.

Digital marketers collect astronomical amounts of client data. The challenge is turning that data into a performance story—one that’s comprehensive but still easy to understand and that can be mined for business insights. Elite SEM, a performance-driven digital agency, leverages Tableau to distill oceans of data into clear, actionable wisdom for Tommy Bahama, Hugo Boss, San Antonio Spurs, Terminix, and other leading brands. In this session we’ll explain: - How we use Tableau to quickly communicate the lessons living inside massive datasets - How we streamlined our visual analytics by creating a single source of truth for our entire data ecosystem - How we created a framework for efficiently producing both standard, template-based dashboards and custom reports - How we connect our team to client data

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.

If you aren't managing your enterprise Tableau deployment by using data, you're doing it the hard way. But the struggle is real. Getting that data to answer your questions isn't for the faint of heart. Allow us to share the cheat codes that will turn you into a veritable deity of data: The new Power Admin Views workbook. How many concurrent users are on our server? Which workbooks can be safely removed? Where are we wasting resources? Are those certified data sources being adopted by the analysts? Developed by Tableau's own server administrators, it put all the answers at your fingertips.

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!