Sessions

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.

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.  

You know the feeling. You’re in a meeting and the slides are terrible. It’s the charts! They’re too complicated or virtually unreadable. Don’t be that person. To inform, persuade, and inspire data-driven conversations, your charts must send a message effectively. Andy Cotgreave has attended thousands of meetings and seen all the mistakes. (He’s even made some himself.) Here, he’ll share his tips for making successful big-screen charts. He’ll cover several areas: types of charts for presentations, chart design for big screens, and the physical aspect of presenting charts. After this session, your presentations will make people lean in, not lean out.

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

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.

Hear from Tableau about our most recent Diversity & Inclusion initiatives, then join an open conversation to share successes and learnings, be inspired by D&I-minded peers, and gather applicable insights.

Level of Detail (LOD) is an important concept in Tableau, but what does it really mean? This talk will explore what LOD means in real-world terms, explore how LOD manifests in Tableau and understand how it affects the questions you can answer with your data.

Attend this deep-dive into forecasting with Tableau. Expect to cover drag-and-drop forecasting with Tableau, and master more complex possibilities using external services. What adventures await when you leverage R or Python? What dangers lurk in the depths of the statistical modeling ocean? Join us and find out.

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) provides food assistance to around 80 million people a year in over 80 countries. WFP's VAM (Vulnerability Analysis and Mapping) unit brings together diverse streams of data in order to analyze and monitor changes in food security. This analysis helps to inform the design of all of WFP's operations. As we incorporate new streams of data and leverage new technologies including Tableau, there is a need for data integration in order to provide a single, common picture that can inform humanitarian decision-making. We will explain our experience with this, as well as our processes, challenges and best practices.

Data catalogs help enable all data workers within an organization to discover and make use of data—regardless of where it’s stored. Come learn and share with others in a special networking opportunity on curating and managing your data strategy!

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are expanding Tableau’s advanced analytics capabilities. Come join this special networking opportunity to discuss and see how others are using AI and ML with Tableau!

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.

We’re thrilled to highlight best-selling author, Adam Grant, as our featured keynote speaker. The youngest tenured professor at the Wharton School, Adam’s new book Originals shows how new ideas can change the world—perfect for a conference full of data-driven truth-seekers.

Tableau Prep has a lot in store for the future. Come and get a taste of where we are, and where we're going. Come see some ideas for Tableau Prep that are in the works, that are planned, or that are currently just ideas. Help shape what you think is important!

Join this technical deep-dive into what Tableau Bridge does, how it works, and best practices for a performant, resilient deployment.

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.

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

In this session, IDPH is proud to share our path to success in delivering faster and better access to data. Attednees will learn how the Iowa Department of Public Health (IDPH) recovered from an end-of-life legacy platform and a data center on life support. Utilizing Tableau visualizations and shifting from on-site to cloud-based AWS storage, IDPH was able to adopt an enterprise-wide data consumption model. Historically poor or difficult data experiences were transformed by the innovative bite, snack, and meal concept and the flexible, robust Tableau visualizations all while being supported 24/7 through an AWS cloud service.

In this session, we'll demonstrate how we use Python, Tableau story templates, and the Tableau API libraries to automate the production of customized analytics for our clients. We will also show how we use Tableau Server workbook tags and custom permissions to drive the delivery through our front-end web application. This results in higher client engagement, and an easier entry for people new to analytics.

How can you use Tableau to make it easier for people to take action on the KPIs and data they're exposed to? This session will cover how to integrate applications like Salesforce into Tableau to make data actionable, and your users more efficient. The goal is to close that last mile of analytics where your users can use Tableau to actually impact the goals they're measured against.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

Want to hit the ground running with advanced data analytics? No sweat! In this session, you’ll learn how to use an ELT approach to maximize your data integration performance; extracting data from multiple source systems, loading it into your data warehouse (at speed!) and conducting complex transformations directly on the data warehouse itself, before pushing the output to Tableau for visualization. We’ll be using data collected from the Strava API, supplemented with additional public data sets for deeper analysis of logged activities. You’ll see how to use Matillion ETL to load and transform this data on Snowflake, before highlighting some best-practices in Tableau, to generate the visual insights your business needs.

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.

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.

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.

Would you believe that even strong Tableau users can learn something new by teaching Tableau to kids? And have a ton of fun in the process! Join me in this session to start brainstorming your own ideas about how to inspire kids to learn Tableau and become Data Rockstars. When my 9-year-old daughter Maggie brought home an assignment about data and visualizations, I showed her my work on Tableau Public. She said it looked like fun and wanted to build a dashboard of her own. That led to the amazing experience of teaching her how to use Tableau to build her first dashboard which was featured by Tableau as part of the #datakids blog series. Her teachers then asked me to present multiple sessions on data and Tableau to their classes. This has been an amazing experience and sometimes I feel like I have learned more than they have.

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

Tableau maps have come a long way since their inception. While the basic creation of maps has remained simple and intuitive, the sum of what can be achieved has grown rapidly. The best way to understand where a feature can go is to fully understand how it has developed. During this session, we'll take Tableau maps right back to the beginning, explore default and custom background maps, deep integration of Mapbox, bring custom spatial data into workbooks, and finally see how Tableau can form part of a larger mapping service stack. Interested in fully understanding this powerful Tableau feature? This session is for you!

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

Are you looking to increase your dashboard views? Do you need one place to tell your story? Portal pages are a great way to keep your users targeted and engaged, while making Tableau the star of the show. This session will provide all the information needed to create portal pages within your organization. Topics will include: • KeyBank’s journey into portals • How portals have forced our analysts to become closer to our users • Getting started with a few simple tools (Tableau Server/Tableau API/HTML/Notepad++) • Designing your portals “like the internet” for users of all technical skills • Structuring your portals to be modular & scalable to create a similar look and feel • Best practices to make your portals shine

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.

Have you ever had to rebuild the same ad-hoc reports for clients because they don’t have access to necessary datasets? What if there was a way to provide an extremely flexible, self-sufficient tool that would allow your clients to build their own visualizations and charts—while keeping your data security team happy? Welcome to Tableau Web Authoring! In this session you'll hear how two very separate teams within DISH successfully implemented Tableau Web Authoring tool in programs that allowed their colleagues and clients to help build reporting and make data-driven decisions on their own. In this presentation, we will share: - Use cases to consider when implementing a Tableau Web Authoring strategy - Best practices when building a training curriculum to help your end-users be successful

We would like to showcase how Trinet uses the power of Tableau SDK and REST API's to provide the flexibility for creating Tableau data sources and publishing them to the server. Additionally, we will provide the power for business users to create their own data connections in Tableau without the obligation to understand the underlying, complex data structures and joins. Trinet has created a reporting tool for both internal and external customers that provides the self-serve functionality for building reports from pre-defined subject areas. With that, comes the need for better visualizations for these reports. Learn to utilize the queries and data generated by this tool, automate the creation of the data connections in Tableau, and publish them for users to build their own visualizations.

Learn what joins look like in Tableau Prep. Here we will show you how to create joins, but more importantly, how to understand what your join has done. Even if you’re already a left-semi-anti-join expert, you’ll probably learn something about joining with Tableau Prep.

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.

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.

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

Join this session to learn what the common server performance issues are, and where they can find relevant information to fix any issues. This will also help explain how to set up monitoring, to keep your server healthy.

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

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.

Join this session to learn and understand how to use the REST API with the Tableau Server Client, and to explore ways to better automate your workflow.

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.

Join this session and see examples that demonstrate why you would want to embed Tableau dashboards inside internal knowledge bases, blogs, and as a component in web applications. You also will get an introduction to the key features required to enable robust embedding.

This session is geared towards an IT audience at organizations that have, or are deploying Tableau enterprise wide. During this session, we will cover a general overview of the Tableau platform with key considerations on four areas: Enterprise architecture (ensuring you have the right architecture in place to successfully deploy Tableau), security and governance (how to avoid a wild-wild west by ensuring the right security and governance control while still enabling self-service analytics at scale), data strategy (adopting the right data strategy for disparate data sources for different use cases), and management and operations (devising an operational plan to support the day to day management, monitoring and maintenance of Tableau).