Sessions

You’re comfortable with ratios and aggregation in Tableau—now you’re ready to stretch your brain and take on the next skillset. This stellar analytics track will move you from amateur to advanced with a lineup of period analysis methods via complex date calculations, nested logic statements, intricate string calculations, advanced conditional filtering, and more. Come learn how to get comfortable with multi-step calculations that will help you immediately in your business and analysis!

Now that the ways we relate to information are evolving more rapidly than we realize, it is time to change our minds about data. This talk is about how we can see this moment as an opportunity to jumpstart a new renaissance, where we can question the impersonality of a merely technical approach to data and bring more value to it.

Giorgia will share how her experiences in the world of data—spanning from business data visualization consulting with her firm to creating visual data art installations for MoMA—lead her to develop a new approach to working with information, a work philosophy she calls data humanism.

Her talk will show with concrete examples how we can use the tools of the designer to radically rethink the way we interact with data and imagine new visuals, tools and experiences that can reconnect it to what it ultimately stands for: our lives, ideas, and experiences.

Visualization best practices are baked into Tableau by design, which makes creating beautiful, effective visualizations easy, but transitioning to such reports may not happen overnight. Moving incrementally can avoid jarring your audience with a complete redesign of familiar dashboards and the ability to iterate quickly can make Tableau a great tool for a journey to more effective reporting, but the biggest obstacle on this path is often the very first step. How can you migrate legacy reports to Tableau as literally as possible? Why is it so hard and what are some subtle enhancements that you can incorporate to slowly build support for better visualization?

Today’s data teams are struggling with ever-increasing data volume from thousands of IOT and mobile devices all in real time. Your business can no longer wait days or weeks for the right data. Teams need to analyze and iterate within hours to stay competitive. But how do you capture data from so many devices in real time? How do you manage the infrastructure and rectify data errors? What about new data sources in the future? We’ll dive in on how to leverage the Alooma data platform to manage all your real-time data and perform advanced transformations and enrichments using real code, all on the fly.

What makes for a great dashboard? Better yet, what makes a good dashboard? Best yet, what even is a dashboard? Dashboards and dashboarding are the buzzwords of analytics and tend to be thrown around without a lot of context or understanding.

In this session we will dive into the underlying principles that make them successful as well as how to utilize them properly for successful adoption.

In order to succeed in this training, you must be interested in learning about dashboards, have a sense of humor, and bring a computer loaded with Tableau. To get the most out of Tableau, you should have a basic understanding of how to operate Dashboards.

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.

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

Is your organization ready to start their Tableau journey? Are you struggling to get executive support or user adoption of Tableau? Learn how Abercrombie and Fitch’s Tableau journey went from an initial IT-driven effort, to business-driven initiative, to having 400+ users and 4,000+ views per week on Server in just three years. In this session, you’ll learn: - How the partnership between business and IT was instrumental in making this journey successful - The importance of clear roles and responsibilities across the organization for Tableau success - The influence of leadership adoption and awareness to drive change management - The importance of understanding what questions are being asked to produce meaningful dashboards, instead of simply recreating Excel reports

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!

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.

PEMCO Insurance is a true northwest company providing auto, home, and boat insurance to our neighbors since 1949. Consistently ranked highest in customer satisfaction, people are the heart of our business. Timely, actionable information helps us serve our customers better, so PEMCO is transitioning from centralized production reporting to distributed self-serve analytics using Tableau. But how do you do enable self-service while still ensuring quality? In this session, you will learn how the information management team at PEMCO: - Uses a multi-tier data delivery strategy to enable user constituencies of varying technical skill - Manages content promotion to ensure confidence - Measures content adoption and Tableau Server performance

Tableau Doctor removes adoption roadblocks by helping patients worldwide answer questions and resolve issues. In this session, Tableau’s Global Tableau Doctor program managers will share best practices on implementing a similar program in your organization - Data Doctor. Learn how to drive adoption by enabling end-users to get their questions answered and how to capture data to identify employee knowledge gaps and training opportunities, and track program success and areas for improvement.

Customer Acquisition and retention are essential in the increasingly competitive world of financial services to survive. Through real business cases, learn how to leverage Tableau to better understand customers, allowing for quick discovery of commercial opportunities and hidden sale potentials.

In this session you will learn:
- How to better understand customers using visual analytics
- How to find undiscovered commercial opportunities quickly and easily
- How to find actionable sale potentials

Don’t bug out when you encounter the red "X" in your Calculation Editor. This session gives an in-depth rundown of common bugs and errors Tableau users find while creating calculations. (Plus, how to exterminate them.) Learn when to aggregate (and when not to), complex logical statements, and calculation best practices, so you'll be able to write calcs that won't pest-er you.

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. 

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.

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

Product managers Jason Burns (from Tableau) and Tom Slee (from SAP) will jointly present best practices, and things you should know about using Tableau on top of SAP HANA for the best possible experience and performance.

Worthington Industries’ steel products are highly customized to end-user specifications. This high-mix, low-volume business makes price optimization using traditional methods difficult. Determining which products/markets to include or exclude from a given comparative analysis is often subjective and can lead to inconsistent recommendations. In our case, machine learning methods resulted in over-fitting due to insufficient training data. Tableau with R allows our analysts to test different market conditions using the power of predictive analytics (logistic regression) in a user-friendly environment. This tool represents the latest evolution in Worthington’s growing adoption of Tableau Server, deploying increasingly sophisticated features to our 50+ users.

Tableau Prep introduces a powerful tool for cleaning data. You can make quick inline edits or make changes that allow you to replace multiple values with a single value. Learn about the group and replace model and clustering in Tableau Prep, some common use cases, and pitfalls to avoid.

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.

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.

State planners say that 2,000 square miles of Louisiana may be lost in the next 50 years due to sinking land and rising sea levels. Maps team members Jim Walseth and Ashwin Kumar will demonstrate how to use recently added and advanced map features in Tableau to reveal the threats in detail. Note: This session was Inspired by the New York Times/Times-Picayune collaboration "The Drowning Coast".

Most companies use two types of data together; one that does not update much, but another that is only valuable when the data is the most updated. In the trading industry, it is the same, but with enormous amounts of data updating in one millisecond. We would like to introduce how TradingScreen solves these challenges and provides better dashboard performance.

Get an inside look at how Tableau runs their technical sales organization of over 300 people using Tableau products. A key to the sales efforts of any technology company is the technical subject matter experts that help a customer find the best solution to meet their needs. In software, this position is often referred to as pre-sales. At Tableau, we call this group customer consulting. Tracy Fagan, Tableau's VP of Customer Consulting, and his team, will share our strategy for how we use data to measure the health of our business and our products to stay on top of what matters every day. You will walk away from this session with new ideas on how to manage your team.

Want to integrate R into your workflow, both before and during your analysis in Tableau Desktop? Join us as we show you how the R integration feature works and how to use it to make calls directly to R, to open up the rich statistical features of R to Tableau. To be able to follow along you should be fairly acquainted with using Tableau (especially LODs and Table Calculations) and should also know R – since unfortunately, we won’t have enough time to teach you either of these during this session.

Tableau empowers global users to quickly and effectively share data regardless of location, regional settings, or the language and locale format of their data. Join this session and be empowered to share data globally.

Companies must tap into the brilliance within their organizations to scale rapidly and move faster than competitors. Pluralsight, today, is helping thousands of companies transform at scale by delivering a state-of-the-art learning environment and courses to educate business professionals in a wide range of technical disciplines. Behind the scenes Pluralsight is embarking on its own transformational journey to centralize all of its data in order to deliver an even more dynamic learning experience for its customers. In this engaging panel discussion, the audience will learn about the architectural and operational considerations in providing many users — with a wide range of data requirements and technical knowledge — access to all Pluralsight corporate data. Fernando Rodriguez, Head of Data Engineering at Pluralsight, will describe the architectural considerations to enable a self-service data environment. Greg Tabak, Director of Data Operations, will describe the operational considerations in providing many users, with a wide range of data requirements and technical knowledge, access to corporate data, and Michael Mixon, a Zen Master at Pluralsight, will provide some unique insights on how easy access to more data fundamentally changes the way you look at Tableau and the impact this can have on a business.

It's hard to analyze data that you don't know exists. How do you know what's out there? Once you find it, can you trust it? What if it contains sensitive information? How can you be sure you have what you need so you can move on to deeper analysis in Tableau? Come learn about the value a Data Catalog can provide as you get hands-on with the Unifi Data Platform. 1) Discover data you didn't know existed using NLP to search through data from across your organization; 2) Build the catalog by crawling through data everywhere - File shares, databases, Tableau Server (Oh My!); 3) Identify sensitive data with Unifi's auto-detection of PII and customizable data masking; 4) Collaborate to create your own community of new data sets, metadata, and user-defined data types; 5) Output your trusted data to Tableau-ready formats (.twbx, .tde) for further analysis in Tableau Desktop

Data is the critical foundation for every organization's digital transformation. To enable analysts to discover and understand where to find their most relevant, trusted data, catalogs have become the central focus that provide intelligent, automated and simplified data discovery and accessibility for all available data assets within the enterprise.

Organizations leverage Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog, a machine-learning and artificial intelligence-fueled discovery engine powered by Informatica’s CLAIRE™ engine, to increase the understanding of all enterprise data assets, right from within analysts’ familiar Tableau environment. Using “Google-like” search, organizations can find all types of enterprise data, discover relationships, and enrich metadata with business terms, crowdsourced annotations, data quality, and usage.

During this two-hour instructor led session you will enjoy a hands-on experience using Informatica’s innovative and collaborative self-service discovery solution. You will learn how a data catalog can work with your Tableau environment to take inventory of all data assets across your enterprise and help you democratize data with the right balance of enabling both governance and flexibility.

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.

Join us for a rich discussion on important topics within the Data + Women Community. In addition to notable women contributors to our community, you’ll hear from customers and Tableau leaders alike about the challenges they’ve faced, the inspirations with which they have built their lives and careers, and—most importantly—how we can grow and succeed together collaboratively. #visualizediversity

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.

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.

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.

Instacart is building the future of grocery delivery, and to do so we must solve hard logistics problems every day. Our solutions to these problems combine machine learning, optimization algorithms and product experimentation. To make continuous improvement we need to quickly understand how our logistics initiatives are driving system improvement. In this talk we'll introduce our framework for measuring long-term improvement and share how we use Tableau to view these changes day by day.

Familiar with calculated fields, but ready to master a new level of analysis? This intro track on LOD (Level of Detail) expressions is ideal for your eager mind. Learn how to articulate the meaning of "Level of Detail," master best practices, incorporate LOD expressions into your daily workflow, and demonstrate how they differ from other calculations.

In this session, we will learn how to deploy connections between Tableau and its advanced analytics external services. We will then utilize these connections to develop powerful and flexible data science applications that make the power of advanced statistics and machine learning available to business users and dashboard consumers at all levels.

At Axis, we’ve embedded functionality for easy access to detailed, actionable data. The insurance industry is comprised of quantitative and analytical minds across underwriting, claims, actuarial and finance. Tableau visualizations are used throughout the organization to help these groups understand trends and performance against goals. Insurance professionals need specific details including account, broker, location and claim, in order to take action. In addition, executives need consistent, structured reporting packs while leveraging interactive dashboards to understand drivers. Participants will gain functional and technical understanding on practical uses of Tableau: - Dashboards that expose variance details, including links to other reports and direct Excel downloads - Leverage customized, dashboard-driven reporting packs built with scripted logic - Integrate Tableau into regulatory controls, data quality, and operational process flows - Support change in underwriting portfolio/operating models

Oh Canada, Tableau customers unite. This session brings together truly Canadian customer presentations representing many of the geographies and sectors across Canada. Tableau success stands tall coast-to-coast so a great opportunity to network with the Canadian customer contingent at TC18 NOLA.

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.

Whether it’s for fun, for practice, for activism, or for pure curiosity, creating your own visualizations and putting them out in public has a tremendous upside—for you, your company, and the world. It doesn't have to be scary! In this talk, we will discuss various facets of public visualizations such as how to start vizzing in public, common design pitfalls to watch for, how to get comfortable with not succeeding, and much more.

Experience why countless Tableau users rely on the Alteryx platform to discover, catalogue, prep, blend, and analyze data for output in Tableau and all other popular formats. Alteryx cuts mundane data preparation time to mere minutes…but that’s just the start! As a one-stop shop for analysis prior to visualizations, Alteryx empowers all data workers to easily tackle basic and sophisticated data prep scenarios, as well as apply advanced predictive and spatial analysis through repeatable workflows, which update whenever the data changes. Alteryx provides direct output to Tableau workbooks, allowing you to update .tde and .hyper files with the click of a button. Join this session for a free trial of Alteryx and forever alter the way you feel about analytics. Download the Alteryx Analytic Templates for Tableau prior to attending this session.

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.

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.

As seen in devs on stage, Tableau is bringing powerful new capabilities to interactive analytics in 2018.3. The new set action feature means you can design custom interactivity beyond filtering and highlighting. Now you can colour, group, hide, or filter a single axis with a selection. The applications are monumental - proportional brushing, benchmarking, relationship analysis, period comparisons, conditional aggregation, and single member drill down to name a few. This session is a must for anyone who has ever wanted dynamic multi select parameters!

Tableau makes exploring your data easy, but what do you do when that data is locked away behind a web service? Is copying or exporting all your data the only hope? Want to connect to web data sources in Tableau and explore them like any other data source? This session discusses Tableau Web Data Connectors and their ability to unlock new sources and easily bring your data into Tableau from both internal and external web services. Together we will write a simple connector then walk through the steps to build, debug, and share the final connector.

From pipeline management to understanding their customers better, sales departments are using analytics to make every minute and call count. This gathering provides a casual environment to connect with and learn from other sales leaders and sales operations professionals.

Are you struggling to keep up with customers’ appetite for more and more data? Is it a struggle to keep your infrastructure up-to-date with the latest and greatest features? Come listen to Tableau’s story of how we're rewriting our data menu by embracing the cloud using Tableau Online and Snowflake data warehouse. We'll share our vision of how to enable a healthy data diet for everyone.

You converted to named user, now what? In this session, we’ll go through strategies for deploying the conversion, and how to help users set up and manage their new named user model.