Sessions

Why sit alone during lunch when you could chow down with fellow data pride peeps? Come out and join members of Tableau’s LGBTQ+ community at an open and inclusive table. Connect with those like you who are interested in diversity and inclusion issues and meet other proud data rock stars. Look for the rainbow–you can’t miss it.

Tableau users are passionate, but how do they spread that passion predictably across an enterprise? Come to learn the 10 ingredients—added in the right steps—that led to a recipe for success for over 55,000 people at GE, J&J, and other leading Tableau clients. Delivered by experts (and former customers) in Tableau's Customer Success team.

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.

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. 

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.

The volume and variety of data continues to increase dramatically as a medium-sized media company has transitioned from a primarily analog company to a digital one. However, the existing reporting tools left access to that data in the hands of very few people. Wanting to change this and knowing that there were budget restrictions, we deployed Tableau Online. Leveraging a phased approach, proved to be successful as the buzz around using data for decision-making has never been higher. Learn about our journey through the peaks and valleys of introducing Tableau Desktop and Online. Learn about practical things that worked and minefields to avoid when deploying Tableau.

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.

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.

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.

Tableau is working to boost our support for data science workflows by strengthening our integrations for languages like Python and R, as well as popular platforms like MATLAB. As these tools become more common in the market, we want to understand your needs and use cases for statistics and machine learning technologies, and how we can make your experience in Tableau powerful and delightful. Get the latest scoop from the team and share your experiences and ideas to help guide our plans!

The Marketing Analytics team at Tableau has been working on a large-scale marketing attribution analysis that involves building up our comprehensive customer journey data across many marketing channels, and attributing true effect of marketing to these channels. We use a combination of Markov Chain Model and traditional Media Mix Model to produce a simulation of how spend across channels impact leads and revenue. Along the way, we uncovered the power of visualization in making complex models accessible to end-users, and helping everyone “see” the model. In this session, you will not only see how Tableau as a marketer tackles one of the most challenging problems in marketing, but also see the power of using Tableau as a tool to bring down barriers to understanding sophisticated models.

Implementing Kerberos within an organization can be tough. This presentation will be a technical overview of the Kerberos protocol, including constrained delegation using an advanced internally developed database, BagelDB. This talk is complimentary (but distinct) from “OAuth on the wire.” Complementing the talk, “Kerberos on the wire”, expect to learn how OAuth is used at Tableau for data sources access. This will be a technical talk which will cover the HTTP exchange and concepts behind OAuth, as well as the implementation for key connectors.

Tableau's new animation feature helps you understand changes in your data by animating your viz marks on filtering, sorting and paging actions. Join this session to learn about these new animations, the theory and design behind them, and best practices for integrating them into your workflow and dashboards.

Join us as we explore how to get started on your first project—and hit it out of the park! We'll share what has worked for us as a small team of users. Learn how to engage stakeholders and boost adoption, as well as other best practices.

This story-driven, Buzzfeed-style talk will introduce you to other real-life Tableau Server admins and address what makes them successful. We'll cover the best practices every admin should adopt to help them run their deployment smoothly, recover from problems quickly, empower their users, and maximize the value of Tableau.

Come meet Irwin Dolobowsky (Product Manager) and Russell Hay (Development Manager) from the Developer Platform team to discuss (yes discuss!) the past, present, and future of Tableau's Automation APIS - REST APIs, TabCmd, Webhooks, and more!  There will be a (very) short presentation prepared but expect to spend most of the time in conversation and Q&A.  What's missing? What works? What doesn't?  Come tell us directly!

Everyone has data dragons—from the cute but messy, to the most hideous malformed monster. But taming these dragons is easy and fun with Tableau Prep! Starting with some simple transformations and moving to some real data challenges, you will see how to leverage the power and paradigm of Tableau Prep to tame even the most stubborn data. You’ll learn how to identify data structures that make analysis easier, leverage Tableau Prep to build efficient structures that meet your analytical goals, and flow between Tableau and Tableau prep to work at the speed of thought!

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.

If your job involves administrating and configuring Tableau Server, this session is for you! We will introduce you to a brand new way to configure your server right from a web browser, using Tableau Service Manager (TSM). We will contrast it with the old way of doing this with tabadmin and demonstrate some new key features such as hot topology and hot configuration changes.

Want to see how Tableau can help your Sales and Marketing departments with Account-Based Marketing (ABM)? We know you do! Join your fellow Tableau enthusiasts along with experts from LinkedIn to share best practices and learn new tricks that can help drive your organization’s bottom line. In this Meetup we will have conversations on different aspects of ABM including measuring success, getting alignment through data, processes and planning, tools and technology, as well as ABM 101 for newbies.

Hoping to scale Tableau more widely throughout your organization? A Tableau Center of Excellence may be the answer. In this session we will discuss the benefits of a Tableau COE as well as take a look at a proven step-by-step approach for planning, building, running, and improving a COE in your organization. Expect to comprehend the benefits of establishing a Tableau Center of Excellence, the people and steps involved, best practices, and insights from data-driven enterprises.

Cars.com revolutionized the attribution game when it released its award-winning Lot Insights dashboard, which uses location to show visitors on or near a dealer’s lot. Since then, we’ve focused on making the report even more valuable by showing dealerships what vehicles are being looked at on their lot, while also making the report faster and providing more data. This session will focus on: • Developing processes and partnerships to capture dealer lot polygon data and visitor location data • Using Python to generate a JSON file of dealership polygons to join with visitor data in a data extract • Building a performant geospatial dashboard that provides dealers detailed information about their visitors

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

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

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

Before the analysis of data even starts, reports show that 80% of your time is spent gathering, cleaning and preparing data. Why? Because data comes in a variety of files and sources, sizes, structures, and levels of quality. Wouldn’t you rather flip that statistic and spend your time performing the analysis and building great visual analytics and dashboards? If so, let us show you how we “mind the gap” and demonstrate how anyone can use Tableau Prep to reshape and refine data into usable data sets, allowing for analysis. During the session, we will reference common challenges our customers have when it comes to using data.

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

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.

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.

Do you question if your visualizations lead to actionable decisions? Do you struggle with helping users who are tantalized by pretty visuals but missing inspiring insights? Do your users change what they want on a regular basis?Hear a Tableau Zen Master Hall-of-Famer and a relative neophyte discuss four easy-to-understand principles guiding the development of impactful and useful visualizations in the global health space. In this session you’ll learn:1. An iterative and easy-to-understand method that takes visualization users through a process of engaging with data and creating visualizations that adapts to changing user needs.2. Best practices and lessons from global health that help users expose, explore and explain their data.3. Approaches empowering users to continue to build their skills and visualization competency.

Looking to implement Tableau's analytics platform in your enterprise? Or are you currently managing Tableau Server on-premises and interested in making the leap to the cloud? This session will give an overview of the differences between Tableau Server and Tableau Online, and the factors to consider for making an informative decision. Discover all the features, from our fully managed SaaS service that empowers you to deploy Tableau at scale. Find out how to keep data fresh even if your data sources are still on-prem with Tableau Bridge. Learn how to provide a scalable analytics platform that is accessible yet secure from a member of Tableau’s own enterprise analytics team.

Join this session to learn how the unlikeliest of places - your company's restrooms, for example - can inspire knowledge workers across the enterprise to adopt visualization best practices and up their Tableau game. In this session you'll hear from the creator of an internal periodical with a global reach of thousands and an editorial board including a former Tableau Iron Viz Champion who will share his lessons learned—one year into an experiment to turn bathroom walls at Facebook into a canvas for data viz best practices.

Verizon’s Analytics Center for Excellence (ACE) strives to augment customer experience using data science in operations with areas including digital, call center, TV content and field dispatches.

We’ll explore:
• Implementation: With 1,500+ dashboards garnering 125,000+ views, ACE has leveraged Tableau to enable agile and flexible self-service analytics truly at scale.
• Integration: Best practices with respect to ingesting billions of rows from industry-leading big data warehouses including Hadoop, Teradata and Oracle.
• Interactivity: Expanding capabilities of Tableau via interactive tools and techniques including satellite and street view geo-spatial mapping and text analysis using R.

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.

Wondering how to deploy an IoT solution that could bring tremendous value to your organization? Get inspired by compelling Tableau Customer IoT journeys, ranging from small businesses willing to unlock new opportunities from sensor data, to the largest enterprises providing IoT Platforms, Solutions and Expertise As A Service. In addition, we'll show live on stage a way to jump-start your IoT project with a flexible platform that can be tailored to your needs, by leveraging AWS and Tableau.

Have you ever felt that you are not getting the full potential out of sets? Join this session to learn more about how sets can be used to answer powerful analytics questions and discuss their various strengths and limitations. Expect to explore many ways sets are used to support deep analysis in Tableau.

At Jazz Pharmaceuticals we rolled out an innovative digital-sales-aid program (iPad apps with educational information for doctors) for our salesforce. However, we had little visibility into adoption, usage of materials and what our customers found useful. We partnered with ZS Associates to develop MIDAS—dashboards to gain better visibility into rep-customer interactions. Our goal was to convert vast data into insights for management/marketing, and encourage higher usage of these insights. Our result was a 300% increase in utilization in under one year, as well as the creation of a self-diagnosing tool for the sales team. Come learn about our next stop on our data journey, as well as our pains and gains throughout the transition.

Think you have what it takes to be a Tableau Jedi? We’ve scoured the universe for the toughest calculations known to mankind and bring them to you. Come test out your calculation skills in this trial-by-fire desktop challenge session. We’ll dare you to solve questions that hit on Pareto calcs, Trellis charts, data blending, table calcs and more! Expect to tackle the hardest calcs in Tableau, learn the theory behind them, work with your classmates, and become a Jedi Master!

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?

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

Last year at TC17, I outlined 10 basic steps, from data inception to decision point. Most of the feedback and questions I received were related to one step, “Communicate and Educate.” I realized that organizational change is a bigger issue that needs to be solved regardless of your level of planning, execution or delivery. While Tableau is Nationwide's current standard for data visualization, we have a lot of departments that are having a difficult time moving from standard reporting to visual analysis. I will share the three key areas we have utilized to drive organizational change successfully through most areas of the company: education, community and support.

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.

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."

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.

We're surrounded by statistics. Many sources use statistics in their message to add authority, conflate and confuse its audience. With updated content using examples from current media, this session aims to highlight common misuses of data, visualization and statistics and arm you against bias and improper conclusions, and inform you with such techniques should you wish to succumb to the dark side…

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.

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.

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.

You’ve enjoyed two years of speed tipping—courtesy of Zen Master Hall of Fame member Andy Kriebel and Zen Master Jeffrey Shaffer. Now join this exciting session and watch the torch get passed on to two new community members. Community all-star Lorna Eden and Zen Master Ann Jackson will take the stage and engage in an all new round of speed tipping. Andy and Jeffrey will be there to keep score and ensure a fair fight. Can the new challengers reach 100 tips?

Call or fold? Are you concerned about hardware scalability for your Tableau Server? Curious about the optimal configuration for your environment? Learn to predict the outcome of your decisions (before making moves in your Tableau Server production environment) via Tabjolt and Logshark. Gain hands-on experience with Tabjolt, like pushing heavy workloads to Tableau Server, and analyzing how the server responds. Then take Tabjolt to your own deployment with knowledge of installation, how and when to use it, test scenario designs, and how to interpret results.

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.