Sessions

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.

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

This presentation covers how IMF is addressing big data challenges, building an analytics roadmap and using Tableau to aid research & policy recommendations. Key areas of discussion will include the IMF’s commitment to gender equality both in workplace and for macroeconomic growth globally as well as addressing SDGs strategically.

Where should we send our admissions representatives to recruit future students? Which course combinations lead to success (or failure)? Where should we schedule alumni events to reach the most people? The answers to all of these questions lies with data. At Winston-Salem State University, Tableau has helped us move beyond the typical admissions funnels and enrollment line graphs to create dashboards for everyone across campus. In this session, we will share our dashboards for longitudinal survey data, major migration, yield rates, co-course mapping, course evaluation reports, assessment games, and more. Join us to learn how we created these dashboards, the mistakes we made along the way (so you can avoid them), and to get ideas for how to make dashboards at your own institution.

Join us for a special pre-TC18 networking opportunity to connect with fellow healthcare enthusiasts. We will share the latest in Tableau activities supporting the healthcare industry and gain insight into all of the healthcare-related activities happening at TC18. Be sure to join us again at the meetup for healthcare best practices later in the week.

The volume and variety of data continues to increase dramatically as a medium-sized media company has transitioned from a primarily analog company to a digital one. However, the existing reporting tools left access to that data in the hands of very few people. Wanting to change this and knowing that there were 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. Learn about practical things that worked and minefields to avoid when deploying Tableau.

Go big with Tableau! Are you planning to broadly deploy Tableau? Have you already put data in the hands of every user in your organization? Well this meetup is for you. Join your peers to network and exchange ideas for deploying at scale.

Currently uninspired by your dull-looking dashboard? Come put a visual pop into your day! This session ensures you’ll sharpen your formatting skills—no matter your current level of expertise. Learn what formatting tools are at your disposal, and various best practices for workbooks, dashboards, and worksheets. Over the course of the class, we’ll create a dashboard that encompasses the various formatting tools at your disposal within Tableau. By session's end, you will have a flashy dashboard that’s as efficient as it is eye-catching.

Join us for the financial services Tableau user group at TC18. This is an opportunity for you to connect with other financial services users 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!

The State of Missouri’s Department of Social Services, Family Support Division (DSS FSD) provides Missouri citizens can apply to access to benefits such as: food stamps, child care, temporary assistance, and adult and family medicaid insurance. To meet or exceed application processing timeliness, the risk analysis unit developed real-time operation business intelligence dashboards for decision makers and front-line staff. This session will share our success in providing operational reports with Tableau and show examples of dashboards currently used by the State of Missouri DSS FSD. Attendees of this session will learn about: - Getting buy-in from decision makers - How simple reports can result in big impacts - Managing data overload

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.

Bring out the magic from your data and create impactful visualizations and meaningful data stories. In this talk we show how you can achieve powerful performance and effective storytelling with the right tools and a smart approach. We will take you through a live demo and leave you with our recommended best practices for tackling large data volumes in Exasol, visualized quickly in Tableau. Join us for a session packed with tips, real business scenarios and some visual inspiration.

Viz or treat! Join us at the TC18 user group meeting for a monster tip battle. Watch as eight powerhouses from Tableau user groups all over the world battle it out with their scariest tips and tricks. Round one contestants will have one-minute to show off their best Tableau tips and tricks. The battle will get bloody in round two when they have to showcase tips and tricks in different versions of Tableau, from Tableau 5.0 up to 8.0. In the final round, the last two contestants standing, will be given 10 minutes to create the spookiest of vizzes. Come find out who will slice their way to the top of the scare-board.

Tableau Server on Linux continues to evolve and improve, based on feedback from customers like you! This session will quickly cover how Tableau Server on Linux differs from Windows, and then explain improvements we have made to the Linux experience since the initial 10.5 release. You will learn how we install Tableau Server, how we improved and simplified our security architecture (no more sudoers!), and more. We'll also highlight issues to be aware of in cloud deployments. This session will cater to attendees with experience in either Linux and/or Tableau Server administration.

Learn how Amazon Redshift and Tableau make it easier to analyze and visualize your data at scale. Amazon Redshift is a fast, scalable data warehouse that makes it simple and cost-effective to analyze all your data across your data warehouse and data lake. Tableau’s ability to connect directly to Redshift and leverage its massive computing power means even the most non-technical business user can quickly discover business insights with easy to use drag and drop visual analytics.

In this workshop we will walk you through the process of deploying an Amazon Redshift data warehouse. We will load data into Amazon Redshift from files in an Amazon S3 bucket from beginning to end. Then we will show you how to use Tableau to visually analyze your data.

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.

The Kobayashi Maru is a training exercise in the Star Trek universe designed to test how people handle “a no-win scenario”. Well, here at Tableau, much like Captain Kirk, we’re stubborn enough to believe that there’s no such thing. In this session, we’re going to explore things that have been previously widely considered “impossible” in Tableau, and get creative about how to solve these previously unsolvable problems. This session will involve: utilization of Tableau Prep for data manipulation, advanced joins, blending, table calculations, data densification, and Level of Detail expressions in order to progress through these problems. An advanced understanding of fundamental Tableau concepts is highly recommended to get the most out of this session, as we will assume attendees will have run into some of these common Tableau roadblocks before. 

Cloudera uses Tableau to enable our marketing team to provide relevant advertising to the right accounts at exactly the right time. We enable our sales team to predict a prospect’s next move—before the prospect even knew they what they wanted. Always-on advertising, actionable insights for sales, historical trending, and machine learning are all part of Cloudera's secret sauce. Join us to learn more!

Learn how trading floor risk management is digitally transforming through Tableau at ScotiaBank. In this session, explore topics such as: - Tableau in financial markets and on a trading floor - Tableau Desktop and Server solutions for corporate restrictions on data access and security - Tableau Server Data sources and how they helped limit corporate red tape, simplify access to big data and bypass slow database issues - Event-based triggers for data extraction, faster performance (caching) and audit trail (PDF generation) through tabcmd - Simple analytics to higher management and regulator (Federal Reserve) reporting

Craving a viz that’s outside the box? Tableau’s SHOW ME feature is stellar—but sometimes something more specific is desired. Join this session and explore the multitude of chart types possible in Tableau. Learn how to build a Chord Diagrams, Waterfall Charts, Comet Charts, Radial Bar Charts, Marimekkos, Shape Fills and Skyline charts (All Charts TBD). We’ll also discuss the pros and cons of each chart, where you can find a good blog post on each viz, and briefly explore additional popular charts that are possible with Tableau.

Being one of the largest retail pharmacy chains in the world, Walgreens wanted to leverage their data to optimize supply chain business strategy. To be able to achieve the use cases that will improve supply chain efficiency and reduce inventory costs, there is a need to process 466 billion rows of inventory data and sales data from over 20,000 suppliers and 9,000 stores. Their current systems were strained while dealing with the scale and cardinality of their data, and could not provide timely insights to thousands of suppliers and business users. The visualizations are essential to support the data sharing strategy between Walgreens and their suppliers. In this talk, Walgreens will describe how they use Kyvos and Tableau to analyze two years of historical data instantly and interactively to get deeper insights into their supply chain.

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.

Join us for an early conference networking opportunity to engage with fellow data geeks working in the Retail and Consumer Goods industry. This gathering provides a casual environment and offers a quick preview of the TC18 Retail and Consumer Goods track and a really cool demo.

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.

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

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.

Let TD take you on the journey of Enterprise adoption – from the humble beginnings of just a few desktop developer licenses to over 1,500 developers across almost every analytical business and technology function. In just a few years we've developed a robust server infrastructure to support the growth and a highly effective Center of Excellence to drive adoption and engagement.

Whether you are on a business side looking to revolutionize the way you tell your data story or a technology team hoping to scale-up your infrastructure – this session is for you!

Whether you’re new to Tableau Online or a Desktop user, this hands-on session ensures you leave with a fully established Tableau Online trial site (complete with Tableau's SaaS solution). Join us for a deep-dive into how to analyze your data, govern your info, add users, and share insights—all from the comfort of the cloud.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Come learn how to create and publish dashboards that are accessible to users with a wide variety of disabilities. We’ll learn about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and how to apply them in Tableau, so that your dashboards meet Section 508 and EN 301 549 requirements.

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.

We’ve all seen visuals that push the boundaries of what Tableau is capable of. Attend this session to learn how the folks on Tableau Public do it! We’ll explore various advanced-to-Jedi level chart types – everything from dumbbell charts and hex tile maps, to Sankeys and sunbursts.

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

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.

Whether you are new to survey data or have been working with it for years, there’s been amazing strides in how you can use Tableau to visualize survey data. In this session, you’ll explore how Tableau Prep helps people working with survey data. Not only will Prep allow you to get your data “just so”, but it will also deal with lots of thorny, real-world situations. Lacking confidence on how to show confidence? We’ll explore some great way to show margin of error. Got Likert scale data? We’ll look at some new, provocative, and remarkably useful ways visualize it. Also learn how to cut a question by any other question, and how to tackle a massive survey comparing lots of different institutions, products, or brands, resulting in thousands of columns.

Satisfy your hunger for data and put your Tableau recipes to the test. In this class, we will take you on a journey behind the scenes into the Tableau Kitchen to see where all the house specials are made. Expect  a robust flavor profile from spicy visualizations to savory table calculations, leave feeling inspired with new tips in tricks to take home to your Tableau kitchen.  Heads up, this class does require some preparation. Before enrolling, makes sure you a working knowledge of the advanced computing options for Table Calculations, familiarity with standard table calculations, and comfort writing calculations.

PS. Toque and smock required (just kidding)

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 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.

Tableau faces the same security challenges you do—compliance, incident management, metric tracking, and resourcing. The information security team at Tableau is involved in supporting everything from GDPR compliance to responding to phishing attacks. Learn how we support our audit processes by using Tableau to track issues, monitor for compliance, and communicate with decision-makers. See how we manage accounts by wrangling answers out of multiple data sources. We've successfully tackled our security challenges with data. Let us help you do the same.

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

In over your head with financial data? Join this session for finance by Tableau Finance and learn how we use our product to crunch the numbers. Expect to learn how to combine actuals from your general ledger with forecasts and budgets within Tableau (when they’re likely originating from different places and stored at different levels of detail), and how to create depreciation/amortization schedules when Tableau doesn’t have a built-in “dates” data source. Along the way, you will get tips on how to Flatten Account/Department Hierarchies and build an Income Statement. If there’s time, we’ll address topics such as Balance Sheet and Dash of Dashboards.

Learn from the personal experience of a people insights and analytics manager to discover how she enables easy user access to human capital metrics at AbbVie. The solutions implemented have led their team to a paradigm shift for business users—from depending on spreadsheets and analysts to provide data, to self-service through Tableau Server.

In this session:
• Learn about the prior state of HR analytics: security challenges, data access, manual calculations, and more.
• Learn the steps AbbVie’s people insights team took to: allow dashboard/enterprise access through Tableau Server, create a better visual experience to understand the metrics, allow drill down, tie up security challenges and create a single source of truth for their entire user base.
• You’ll see AbbVie’s people insights dashboard and a preview of the process that got it built and in front of the right users.

Several of our customers have deployed Tableau on large and complex data sources. Ensuring performant and efficient deployments that scale to a large number of users entails clever design choices, the best-of-breed agile architectures that optimize data storage and compute resources, as well as intelligently crafted workbooks. Join this session to learn some best practices derived from real-world customer examples and lab tests, to visualize and architect big data for performance at scale and with agility.

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

There are endless numbers of opportunities and problems found in every company’s marketing data. Join us for a special networking opportunity to engage with others using Tableau in marketing and learn from them. The meetup will be in a casual and conversational. Specific topics will be chosen by the audience with guidance by Tableau marketers.

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.