Sessions

Information overload is real. If glancing over your dashboard makes your eyeballs spin in their sockets, this session is for you. We’ll intro you to your new BFF: guided analytics—a design concept that helps you communicate more effectively via interactive dashboard navigation and story points. Learn to use the different types of Tableau Actions that allow end-users to drill down from summary-level data to more granular information. This session will teach you how to guide your audience with story points and encourage self-service data discovery through highly interactive analysis.

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.

Tableau users are naturally more likely to adopt a dashboard if it feels familiar and customized for them. With so many options of how to format in Tableau, it can sometimes feel daunting to be assigned the task of implementing a seamless and repeatable corporate standard. In this session, you will learn how to create a unified look and theme across dashboards in Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and on mobile devices, without even needed a degree in graphic design. You will also learn how to provide templates for your designs to be reused by others. Finally, the session will cover how to customize your Tableau Server interface or use the Javascript API to take advantage of existing user portals.

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.

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.

As part of our strategic planning, Shawnee State University has undertaken a major initiative to become a data-informed campus. As a part of this effort, there is a recognition of the strategic importance of enrollment management and student affairs data. Through a cross-campus partnership, the Enrollment Management: Matriculation to Graduation Dashboard allows us to drill-down from application through enrollment to analyze academic year cohorts, specific student group cohorts, student progress, and student-generated revenue. Shawnee State will illustrate the planning process, approach, and key components required for success and share: - Lessons learned in the dashboard process - Best practices, including WCAG compliance, when designing dashboards - Techniques for herding your team to success

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!

Starting out with statistics? This session is for you. We’ll launch from basic statistics (what they mean, how to access them in Tableau), then tackle creating box plots, histograms, control charts and more.

Wondering how to get the most out of your database when connecting to Tableau? What are best practices for Querying, Custom SQL, Extracts, Blending, Joins, Unions and Federated Joins? Join this session and learn on Tableau and Database Performance.

Tableau President & CEO, Adam Selipsky, and other data leaders will share their vision for the future of visual analytics.

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.

The development of a new airplane requires strict attention to a vast array of business health baselines (e.g. schedule, Risk-Issue-Opportunity, finance) in order to deliver on a plan. These baselines and their underlying data exist within disparate architectures, making analysis hard to find and prescriptive program management decisions difficult to make. Using Tableau, Boeing's 777X Program Management Analytics Team has normalized, blended and presented these disparate data streams as a common digital thread, visualized on a series of Tableau dashboards deployed via mobile and server. This analytics platform is used daily by more than 2,000 users from engineers to vice presidents as they visualize program health data to make informed decisions and digitally transform program management for Boeing’s second century.

Come check out the all-new version of Tableau Mobile. In this session, we’ll take a tour of the redesigned app and show you how we’ve made it easier and faster to access your data on the go. We’ll also take you behind the scenes to see how we used Tableau and customer feedback to drive priorities and inform product design.

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.

This demo-heavy session will deliver a wide range of mapping features in Tableau. You’ll leave this session understanding how to build several different maps using geocoding and spatial connectors. We’ll dive into best practices and uncover some common mistakes and how to correct them. Expect to learn how to use the superstore data set to get started, how to define and use spatial files, and how to build a dashboard that uses multiple vizzes (including a map) within a scenario to uncover outliers or interesting data.

Are you interested in your dashboards and vizzes providing even more insight through NLG? Come to this special networking opportunity to discuss the power of narratives and stories built right into your Tableau visualizations!

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.

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

In this session we will demystify sets, one of Tableau’s most powerful analytics features. Whether you haven’t used sets, or deeply know their ins and outs, this session is for. If you enjoy sunsets, dislike being upset, and possess an analytical mindset… well, you will love sets.

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

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.

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.

Data Security takes a lot of ingredients, and even if you’ve got a recipe that works for a nightly dinner, you may need a new plan when everyone’s coming for a celebration (like TC18!) . Ron, Jon and Bryant are here to show you how to make Going Big Easy with all of your row level security needs. As members of Tableau’s Embedded Analytics and GSI teams, they handle only the biggest and most complex of customer security use cases, and in this session, they’ll learn you how to make programmatic variations on data sources, secure incoming API parameters, and even generate entire data sets in Hyper with security baked right in.

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.

Educators make countless decisions every day to help students reach their full potential. In many schools, educators make those choices with limited or out-of-date information due to the extreme effort required to assemble relevant student data. In this talk, learn how the Connecticut RISE Network empowers partners with collaboratively designed dashboards and data protocols that allow educators to make informed decisions as efficiently as possible. You will see concrete examples of how teacher teams identify clusters of students in need of intervention, and then drill down to individual students to view multiple measures before deciding on personalized interventions for each student.

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

Speech analytics has historically been limited to the contact center, but the customer interactions in your .wav and .mp4 files contain a plethora of customer experience insights for almost every department! From competitive analysis to understanding the common objections and obstacles in the customer journey, AI-powered speech analytics can deliver the true voice of the customer within your organization. In this session you’ll learn how to master the “art of the possible” by ingesting transcribed voice calls into your data lake, making them ready to be beautifully visualized in Tableau!

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.

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

As the health care system undergoes significant change, the need for simplifying pharmacy data and finding actionable insights has never been greater.  Health systems need to quickly identify ways to reduce costs and improve revenue. 

Given the volume of data, our summary dashboards are essential to quickly identifying opportunities and then allow a user-determined path to more detailed data.  Integrating data from many sources allows health systems to identify high cost diagnoses, compare prescribers and identify drugs with sub-optimal reimbursement.  

While this approach produced the best user experience, it presented technical challenges to implement. We will share our lessons learned and challenges for implementing this approach such as using the JavaScript API navigating between levels of detailed data, maximizing performance and development efficiency.

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.

Built on a strong track record of success, Accenture’s partnership with Tableau provides innovation and repeatable offerings across the Tableau platform. Accenture has a breadth of Tableau knowledge and expertise with 3,100+ global skilled resources, 6 Delivery Centers of Excellence and successful delivery of 150+ joint deployments. In this session, Accenture will showcase Accenture’s Visual Intelligence and Analytics depth of knowledge and experience leveraging Tableau in various offerings, assets and solutions such as Retail and Financial Services. Come and learn how we can help you transform and analyze your business with powerful business insights on demand.

Spotify uses Tableau Public as a storytelling tool to share interesting insights about music, artists, and global listening behavior. Spotify Data Visualization Designer, Skyler Johnson, walks through several projects that combine Tableau Public and Spotify data. Alongside each story, learn a Tableau trick or visualization style that helped make each visualization possible, and walk away inspired to think about your own data in a different way.

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.

As the UK's second largest long-haul airline we have tons of interesting data ranging from the fares that passengers have paid for their seat to how many miniature bottles of gin we load onto our jumbo jets to Vegas!

Using Tableau Desktop, Tableau Server and Alteryx we have transitioned from a web of Excel based reports to an efficient, centralized portal where analysts, managers and leadership alike can gain the answers they need, when they need them.

In this session we will give practical examples of how we’ve made a number of small changes to improve our adoption along with braving a live demo to show just how quickly our analysts can create production-ready reports.

Given today’s healthcare landscape, it’s more important than ever to have the latest data to make the best decisions. Lehigh Valley Health Network is leveraging the might of Tableau, the expertise of its enterprise analytics team, and the power of EPIC to deliver fast, clear, and concise analysis that helps provide better care, better cost, and improved outcomes for our patients. We will dive into how we used Tableau to identify and improve clinical care during pregnancies, staff appropriately for a new mother-baby unit, and just how we got Tableau to consume 48 million records—without sacrificing efficiency.

Are you struggling to make sense of your survey data? Understanding the steps to prepare survey data for analysis is key to be able to then easily analyze that data. This session will cover reshaping, cleaning data in Tableau Prep and finally visualizing survey data in Tableau Desktop.

Time to tuck table calcs into your already impressive Tableau tool-belt? This session was designed with your analytical insights in mind. Join our hands-on attempt to better understand table calcs. We’ll tackle more complex functions (other than the basic “Quick Table Calculations” menu) and solve more advanced nested calculations as they pertain to specific business problems. By session’s close, you’ll have mastered skills like writing table calcs via the calculation dialog, customizing calcs through partitioning and addressing, filtering and much more. Joiners should be familiar with applying basic table calcs from the right-click menu (percent of total, year over year growth, etc.), changing how a table calc is computed using the drop-down menu (table down, pane down), writing basic calculations (profit ratios, percentages), and an understanding of basic aggregations (SUM, AVG, MIN/MAX).

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

Ensure your existing visualizations function beautifully and efficiently on mobile devices. Join us and learn specific strategies for translating complex, desktop-oriented dashboards to mobile. We’ll also address best practices for mobile design, and how to create new visualizations from scratch using Device Designer.

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

By using Tableau you’re already gaining indispensable insight and transformative value with your data. Tableau’s capabilities provide limitless opportunity as the end user can discover, explore and share data asking and answering questions at the flow of their own thought. But, whether you’re an administrator, key stakeholder or end user, how well you leverage Tableau can significantly impact your success and long-term business adoption. In this session, we’ll explore how to fully engage with Tableau, provide you with a road map to data-driven success, use cases and introduce you to tools to ensure lasting value with your Tableau investment. 

Tableau helps people see and understand data. These seven words create a fundamental shift in an organization’s approach to data, and along with it, change. While organizations prepare technically for this, often times we forget to prepare our most important resource—people. In this session, we'll explore the reasons behind people’s natural resistance to change, and explore the mind-set of your workforce. We'll introduce methods for addressing this resistance through the use of champions, communities, success planning, and more! By the end of this session, you'll have a better understanding of how to bring your teams from resisting change to embracing change and the importance of investing not only in amazing technology but also in supporting your amazing people.

Imagine that those fancy visual analytics map tricks you fire up your GIS for could suddenly be done right in your favorite data analysis tool, Tableau. In this session Sarah and Konstantin, holding PhDs in geography and spatial science, and licenses to make analytically powerful maps in Tableau, will give you a whirlwind tour of advanced spatial and visual analytical tasks. Learn about point density maps, alternative map projections, great circle routes, directed arrows, and more. All of these will be done with Tableau directly or using our API ecosystem, and free, open-source software to complement Tableau.

Alberta Health Services (AHS) is the largest integrated healthcare system in Canada. This presentation will showcase the use of visual analytics to measure financial, operational, staffing, risk, project performance and employee satisfaction in the AHS IT department with 2000+ employees and $ 500 M in annual spend. Key solutions developed will be presented with lessons learned while creating a team, ingesting data from 90+ systems, and delivering 50+ analytics solutions in 9 months.

In 2017, there were 687 deaths related to accidental opioid overdose in Alberta. This presentation will also articulate how AHS is deploying visual analytics for crafting and disseminating actionable surveillance information to various stakeholders and partners, to enable a coordinated response to the opioid crisis in Alberta with measurable impact.

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)

The healthcare industry is under pressure to reduce costs, while keeping the customer front and center. Our presentation will walk through: - Changes implemented to achieve greater affordability by increasing our fee for value programs - How our Tableau reporting solution enables physician groups to drill into actionable trends, such as steering patients to higher quality specialists, reducing unnecessary care, reducing opioid prescriptions, and targeted quality of care for preventive and chronic diseases. - Our redesigned reporting solution that allows physicians/practice managers to understand patient trends, leveraging a Tableau Server installation, exposed beyond our firewall to external physician group partners. Its secure, group-specific dynamic reporting is accessible via a multi-use Cigna web portal.

Users make mistakes. It’s a fact of life. In defense of their own sanity and the stability of their service, admins often resort to draconian rules that end up heavily restricting the freedom of their users—removing much of the value of Tableau in the first place!

Join this session to learn a new way to keep your server deployment healthy and give your users the guided freedom they need to thrive with Tableau. We’ll go over two resources used internally at Tableau to automate the enforcement of best practices, ensure data quality, and help users who need just a little advice to get past an issue.

Anyone can analyze basic social media data in a few steps. But once you’ve started diving into social analytics, how do you bring it to the next level? This session will cover strategies for scaling a social data program. You’ll learn skills such as how to directly connect to your social media data with a Web Data Connector, considerations for building scalable data sources, and tips for using metadata and calculations for more sophisticated analysis.

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.