Sessions

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!

Financial services firm, Charles Schwab, provides a number of services to their investors and has an even greater number of data sources. Gessica and Branden will share a story of transformation through culture shift, supported by a robust Center of Excellence (COE). The presentation will show you how to enable better analysis through best practice evangelism, dashboard usability studies, and hosting entertaining events like the Schwab Iron Viz. You will also learn how regular software upgrades and partnering with Tableau enables self-service analytics on an galactic scale.

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

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.

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.

Take a journey and learn how to utilize one of the most powerful and useful features of Tableau. Sets! This session will help build a foundation for beginners, and then offer a fast ramp-up on the various methods for creating sets. Dive into the simplicity of elementary cohort analysis, learn to quickly visualize set membership, and reduce the drama in your everyday analysis while running complex comparisons among set members. Get ready to fall in love with sets throughout this training as we explore data in a variety of different places!

The session will examine ProSight’s data analytics journey, exploring challenges as a growing firm, and how we addressed them using Tableau to gain useful insights into our data. It will walk through process improvement initiatives implemented as a result of end users now having access to data that supports their previously unsupported assertions. We will provide insights into how we replaced our enterprise financial reporting tool with Tableau in under four months, reducing costs by 53%, improving speed of data availability by 43% and reducing error rates due to gaps in systems interfaces by 40%. Using Tableau, we reduced the time to integrate new data sources from months to days, enabling a culture of transparency and ownership.

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."

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.

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

With Web Data Connectors you can connect Tableau to any web service with a little code. In this session, we'll walk through what a Web Data Connector is and the tools that help you write one. We'll even write one on stage to connect to live data!

Students’ college preparedness and success are key performance indicators for any school district. However, measuring these outcomes is usually limited to graduation rates or performance on college entrance exams. In this session, the Cherry Creek School District will share visualization tools that track graduates beyond high school as they travel on the road to and through college. Blending local data with data from the National Student Clearinghouse and the USDOE’s College Scorecard database, we'll demonstrate how we incorporate geographical maps with various measures of college enrollment, including where students attend college, the types of colleges they attend, and the selectivity of various institutions. Visualizations will be shared that depict degrees earned and comparison percentages of high school graduation versus college enrollment.

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.

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.

In this session, we will walk through a complete Tableau portal and the key Tableau technologies used to build it such as: integrated authentication, the REST API and the JavaScript API. You’ll learn through specific examples how to approach building your own embedded Tableau portal. The portal used will be at a level of functionality such that the session is also about the art of the possible.

In this session, you'll learn how to extend Tableau with the power of machine learning as a non-data scientist, and elevate your data analysts to citizen data scientists. Using Big Squid's machine learning platform Kraken, we'll show you how to uncover hidden patterns in your data and answer forward-looking business questions like "What will happen tomorrow?" and "What can we do about it today?". Come learn from other Tableau customers on how they embraced machine learning and saw immediate value with Kraken, running predictive analytics, what-if scenarios and providing actionable insight to the business. Get on the path to predictive today!

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

More and more HR departments are hiring data scientists and using analytics to improve their recruiting, hiring, and retainment practices. Learn from others about what is making an impact on their business. This gathering will provide a casual environment with audience-led discussions. Come with your questions ready.

The State of Ohio’s enterprise Tableau deployment supports agencies and programs across the state, including: connections to the state’s data warehouse, data lake and analytics environment, and data sources. Our Tableau deployment is part of a platform design that is flexible and scalable, will function at an enterprise level, yet still meet the needs of individual agencies and projects. Come learn how the State of Ohio data analytics program seeks to address three major challenges common in large enterprises: - Data silos - Aligning in-house and market-leading expertise - Keeping up with a rapidly changing technology landscape

In this session, attendees will see examples and real scenarios that will illustrate how developers can leverage Tableau’s open-source server monitoring utilities and combine them with intelligent, real-time analytics to monitor Tableau environments at scale. Attendees will get a firsthand preview of an entire analytics suite which showcases Tableau design and reporting best practices all while capturing information about Tableau usage, performance, concurrency and so much more. In addition to that, this session will show how this information can be turned into developer-facing solutions, providing otherwise unknown details on what’s happening in Tableau sites and projects and allowing them to transition and evolve with their users at speed.

See how the US Department of Navy uses Tableau to visualize enterprise acquisition, procurement trends and metrics to aid in decision making, while leveraging predictive analytics to improve future buying outcomes. The e-business team within the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy's Acquisition and Procurement team (DASN/AP) will share how they selected, designed, implemented, and operated their KNIME and Tableau environment to meet their unique mission needs. Expect to see sample dashboards and predictive analytics driving data-driven decision making such as: - Current and historical procurement trends and metrics - Strategic sourcing and workload balancing analytics - Near real-time transaction throughput tracking - Total time and cost to procure a specific item - Predict future transmission and payment problems - Predict negative vendor/ contract outcomes in support of risk management

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).

Why sit alone during lunch when you could chow down with fellow data geeks supporting the banking industry? Join members of Tableau's financial services team at a reserved table in Data Village and connect with your peers.

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.

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.

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.

Join this session to learn more about each of the four different calculation types in Tableau. This session is designed for those who would like to take the 'analytics' in their 'visual analytics' to the next level.

What is your name? What is your quest? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? If you can only answer two of the three questions above, you’ve come to the right place. This introductory course on calculations will guide you through correctly aggregating data, constructing true-false analyses, writing if-then statements, and performing string and date calculations. Most importantly, we’ll be using what we learn to answer one of the most legendary questions of all time.

With important company data, it's often tempting to make a single dashboard that will show the data in the best possible way for everyone at the company. This is a trap. Different people need different things from the data, and have different design considerations. In this session, we'll walk through three typical audiences (Exec, middle management, and ICs) and how to make the data useful for each.

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.

VizQL, the language at the heart of Tableau, ties together UI, queries, and a powerful mental model of data visualization. It allows users to build insightful vizzes and gives tools access to information for automated reasoning about the results. But that's just one example of languages that can allow for rich user input, optimizations, natural language interaction, and machine learning tools.

Join the Maps Dev team and your fellow mapping enthusiasts for an hour dedicated to you. This session will have opportunities to network, participate in group discussion, and provide feedback to the Map Dev team on the problems you are solving and want to solve with Tableau mapping capabilities. If you work in State and Local Government, Transportation and Logistics, Oil and Gas, Retail, Natural Resource Management, Insurance, Consumer Services or in any industry or position where your location drives your business, please join us.

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

Whether taking action from insights, enabling custom functionality, or even writing back to your data sources, the Extensions API helps take your dashboards to the next level. Join us in this session to learn about how the Extensions API enables all of these things (and more), and even get hands-on and build your very first extension. Note: Building an extension requires coding in JavaScript. Some elementary JS knowledge is strongly recommended for this hands-on training.

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!

Our developers love to make Tableau user life easier. This is also true for Tableau Server/Online administrators who are governing small and large deployments. With the REST API, you can manage and change Tableau Server/Online resources (workbooks, groups, projects, etc.) programmatically. During this session you will learn how to leverage Tableau REST API, discover how to use an existing Python library to streamline and simplify REST API calls and learn to develop successful applications and script integrations based on customers’ examples. This session will involve hands-on coding in python and while samples will be provided and explanations offered, prior exposure to python syntax will be expected.

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!

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!

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.

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.

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.

This breakout session will explain the queries generated for different user scenarios, from a simple to a complex viz. We will also cover how caching impacts the query generation, how nested calculations, LOD calcs and published scenarios impact queries and their performance. We will go over the different tools available to study the Tableau query performance: Tableau Log Viewer, Tableau performance recording, Tableau visualization of logs, and ART tracing that we have introduced. In the process, we will cover how to narrow down performance issues, root cause to a particular visualization or quick filter.

Join this session for an in-depth analysis of best practices for content structuring, global content strategy, stale content management, and catering to internal vs. external audiences in Tableau’s 18.3 release. We’ll also explore how to configure permissions to best roll-out your content strategy.

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

Are you responsible for managing data governance in your organization? Have you been responsible and want to share your experience? Join us for a special networking opportunity to discuss the fun and challenges of data governance. This gathering provides a casual environment to connect with your peers and encourage inspired conversation.

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!

Hey data wizard—want to make magic? Join this session and master the tricks to best utilize the multiple marks cards and dual axis charts behind amazing visualizations. We'll teach you how to synchronize axes, and how to best use chart types with multiple marks.

In this no-holds-barred, rapid-fire-demo-style session you will laugh, you will cry, and most of all you will be inspired by what is possible with the extensions API.

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.

Science journalist and bestselling innovation author Shane Snow (Wired, GQ) takes you on an adventure in lateral thinking and human behavior that will change the way you think about people, collaboration, and the power of data.