Sessions

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.

Have you ever been asked: - to build a pie chart with 100 slices? - to build sparklines that never decrease because partial months are perceived as tanking? - to label every point on a chart? - to replicate an Excel spreadsheet? A day in the life of an analyst is not easy. We often wear multiple hats and become translators for different parts of the business who often don’t understand data, processes, or even the business itself. In this hands-on session, Zen Masters, Pooja and Adam of TheDataDuo.com will walk through real-life business cases, including gathering requirements, building solutions on-the-fly, and delivering artifacts to our stakeholders. You will learn about techniques employed in our environments and how to deal with stakeholders that have limited to zero data literacy.

Periodic “hackathons” are one of the tools we use to drive innovation at Tableau. A hackathon is a few days that are set aside for members of the engineering team to go off and try to build a new feature that interests and excites them. Some hackathon ideas have come from customer feedback and forum discussion, others are just wacky. Some hackathon projects have later developed into Tableau features. Come for an inside view of some of the best hacks of 2018! (Please note: All hacks are speculative or wacky. They might never become part of a Tableau release. We make no promises that any hack that you see will become part of the product, but hey, come have fun anyway!)

This session will build upon the 101 and 201 sessions, and go deeper into new discoveries and ways that the Tableau HR and recruiting team are using Tableau products.

Over the past number of years, our "Designing Efficient Workbooks" whitepaper has been a popular guide to improving performance. This session, presented by a student of the author, will cover the main causes of slow workbooks and offer practical suggestions on how to improve them. Expect to address topics such as defining efficiency (and why you should care), and diagnosing the cause of slow workbooks (via workbook design, the query, the data source, or environmental factors).

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

“My boss just dumped a bunch of dashboards in my lap and she says that half of them are broken. Help!” Has this happened to you? In this session, you'll see common issues that cause "broken" dashboards, along with a basic troubleshooting flowchart for fixing them. You'll learn how to locate formulas and filters that might be causing problems, and how to reverse-engineer a dashboard to make improvements, so it’s beautiful and useful for everyone who needs it.

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.

Table calculation or LOD expression? This session will provide you with a framework for making that choice. Learn about relevant parts of the calculation pipeline, performance implications, and the suitability for the scenario at hand. And, of course, you will hear real-world examples to illustrate each of these points.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Why and how do you use Prep to solve data prep? Join this introductory class to find out how to clean, shape and combine data the "Tableau Prep way". This means pushing on experimentation, using visualization and profiling to understand your data, and staying in the analytical flow. This class should be our equivalent to “Why visual analytics?”, where we show people why our visual perception is a powerful way to understand data.

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.

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.

Kaiser Permanente generates vast data assets across clinical care, healthcare delivery operations, insurance, and more. This session covers two journeys with self-service visual analytics within KP: medical imaging and kidney disease care. Both teams use Tableau Server to empower hundreds of clinical and operational users across Southern California to quickly answer ad hoc questions, regularly monitor performance, and proactively manage panels of high-risk patients. We will demonstrate both traditional BI and advanced analytics solutions, ranging from descriptive reporting to predictive modeling.

Attend this session to learn about:

• Transitioning from manual spreadsheet-based reporting to self-service dashboards and server subscriptions
• The application of iterative design methodology and input from end-users to maximize adoption
• Examples of in-production dashboards used by KP providers, including clinical and operational impacts of these tools

Are you new to (or considering!) Tableau Server and looking for ways to on-board users, promote best practices, and scale adoption with ease? Organizations new to Tableau Server often struggle with laying the right foundations for success. Discover how easy Tableau Server can be for new users with tools like Certified Data Sources and Dashboard Starters. Learn how to teach your users the basics around organizing, and securing your sites, projects, and data sources. Finally, learn how enabling adoption can lead to better insights for the entire organization!

Everyone loves a good map (especially your boss), but for the last few years, doing more with your maps has required multiple tools beyond Tableau. Too many tools, too many techniques that require long blog posts to understand, and too many times “That’s only possible with the Javascript API”. You’ve been waiting for your DeLorean and it still hasn’t arrived. Fear not, for Mapbox and Tableau are here to bring you the future of maps, today. In this session, we’ll cover how to solve your biggest mapping challenges all within the Tableau platform, from the most basic styling to address-level geocoding to doing drive-time analysis, with a few surprises thrown in. When we’re done, you can hop on your hoverboard and take it all home with you.

What if you could directly ask Tableau questions about your data? In this presentation, members of the Ask Data team will discuss how we are lowering the barrier to analytics and leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) as a tool for visual analysis. We will provide a detailed overview of Ask Data’s capabilities along with a product demonstration.

The performance of your Tableau Server deployment can make or break your users' experiences, and the acceptance of Tableau within your organization. Let's roll up our sleeves and take a deep dive into understanding how different components of Tableau Server work together, and how to maximize your deployment's performance. Learn about tools and methods to monitor the performance of your deployment and diagnose underlying problems. Gain a deeper understanding of how workbook load times, backgrounder schedules, query performance, and virtual machines all have on your system as a whole.

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.

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.

In order to stay competitive, organizations are increasingly relying on data science to make decisions. However, small teams of data scientists may not have the bandwidth to meet the increasing demands of internal or external customers. One solution to this challenge is to combine the power of Tableau with the scalability and flexibility of the web. In this talk we'll demo a live web portal with embedded Tableau vizzes and data science models that users can query via parameters and visualize in real time!

This session goes beyond Tableau's R/Python integration by persisting tables of output from a model, leveraging the performance of a database, and supporting different inputs/outputs than the Tableau viz LOD. If you're interested in learning the building blocks and Tableau APIs required to make this a reality, then this session is for you!

Learn how a division of Home Depot is increasing customer experience and saving money by holding our vendors accountable using interactive Tableau dashboards and machine learning. Getting orders right the first time and produced/shipped on time is paramount to our customers. Exposing production times and other data to our vendors through secure, well designed Tableau dashboards, our teams are helping them achieve these goals. Our machine learning models help detect problem orders before they occur, alerting our teams before they get to the vendor, helping save production costs and improving customer satisfaction.

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

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.

Unlike traditional printed reports, the Tableau Foundation's annual report is hosted in Tableau Public, which allows anyone to interact with the data and ask follow-up questions. The data even updates automatically every week—unheard of in the non-profit community! Join Tableau Foundation's Director Neal Myrick and Sr. Program Manager, Jason Suchumacher, as they explore how they built their annual report in Tableau. You’ll learn strategies for how organizations can move beyond the traditional annual report. Whether you're a non-profit, corporation, or foundation, you’ll walk away with new ideas and approaches for how your organization can share its latest information and cut the time and costs of producing a traditional printed piece.

Windstream’s Campaign Influence project brings together data from Marketo, SalesForce, and billing systems to provide a single source of truth across sales and marketing. Learn how the marketing strategy team developed a common language and measurable goals to understand trends and create an environment for agile business deployment decisions. Moving from manual spreadsheet reporting to automated, systematic updates wasn’t easy, but efficient design and strategic partnerships from inception to deployment resulted in a sustainable, effective, and time-saving tool. This session will cover the importance of creating consistency across departments with tips to get there, how to design for a range of users from executives to individual contributors, and clear concepts to capture marketing influence.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

A few weeks after taking the reigns as Tableau Product owner at Micron I started feeling like I had bitten off a lot more than I could chew. Shifting to a crowdsource structure has enabled us to do a lot more with limited resources. Developing an effective COE has been an essential part of this effort. Lessons learned can be stepping stones for others.

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

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

Craving a viz that’s outside the box? Tableau’s SHOW ME feature is stellar—but sometimes something more specific is desired. Join this session and explore the multitude of chart types possible in Tableau. Learn how to build a Chord Diagrams, Waterfall Charts, Comet Charts, Radial Bar Charts, Marimekkos, Shape Fills and Skyline charts (All Charts TBD). We’ll also discuss the pros and cons of each chart, where you can find a good blog post on each viz, and briefly explore additional popular charts that are possible with Tableau.

Do you want to build visualizations that help your city or agency prioritize capital improvements? Direct resources to at-risk neighborhoods? Improve emergency operations? Increase cross-departmental collaboration? A major impediment to city staff making well-informed decisions that support equitable, long-term solutions is the lack of reliable data presented in an easy-to-understand format. Using open data in Tableau can help you solve that problem. In this session, learn how Headwaters Economics is using Tableau and U.S. Census data to provide cities across the country with access to up-to-date, neighborhood-level information about at-risk people and their vulnerability to the impacts from climate change. Learn lessons for developing Tableau tools for your city or agency. Headwaters Economics will share examples and design practices that have resulted from working directly with municipal staff.

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.

Why is the weather forecast always wrong? Are all shopping centres the same? Do bands always play the same set at gigs? How can we use data to answer these everyday questions you might debate with friends? That’s what two Zen Masters, Chris Love and Rob Radburn have been doing for the last six months. In this session, we’ll show you how we think-up questions, the tools we used to collect and wrangle data, and how we viz. And then show how we make sense of it all to provide an understanding of the data. Come along if you are looking for inspiration for your own Tableau projects, tips on getting agile and creative at work, or to see the world differently.

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.

Data literacy is a critical skill in the 21st century. We believe this new skill will change the world in the same way that literacy transformed access to knowledge in the centuries after the printing press. However, just having access to new technology is not enough. The printing press automated the publishing process, but that still required people to learn to read and write. Similarly, the broad availability of data and analytical tools needs a fundamental change in human behavior. Data literacy is not just about consuming and understanding data visualizations but more importantly about applying the genuinely human traits of curiosity and critical thinking to your data.

So, you've deployed Tableau and have 100 users? Are you ready for that 100 to become 1,000 users? What about 10,000? Tableau is a great tool and can spread like a virus. Join this session, led by Paul—who’s grown his Tableau Centre of Excellence from zero to 13,000 users, while maintaining a solid, affordable deployment with an engaged user base and dynamic community. Learn top tips for scaling your service, such as: scaling your infrastructure, monitoring performance, capacity, organizing your team and support, and more.

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

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

Learn to communicate more effectively by using metaphor in data visualization. Metaphors help people understand something new in relation to something they already know. Whether literal or abstract, metaphor can help your users understand your message by using comparisons to tangible items like height, or abstract concepts like sound as the basis for more accessible chart communication.

We will walk through several examples of Tableau dashboards that use visual metaphors, and discuss what makes effective and ineffective metaphors. In this session, you’ll learn how metaphors work with mental models to help users understand and retain information, as well as how to tell engaging and memorable visual stories with Tableau’s out-of-the-box features by adding visual thinking techniques into their design process.

Does your organization publish data visualizations on their website or company blog? Learn how the likes of tell their public-facing data stories using Tableau. In particular we will learn how to find data stories that your PR and social media teams will love, design beautiful vizzes optimized for public consumption, embed vizzes in your website, via Tableau Public, and ensure everything fits within your existing site content.

Flex is ushering in the Age of Intelligence by delivering insights, cultivating ideas, and pushing boundaries. Through leadership in design, engineering and manufacturing digitization, Flex is on a mission to put supply chain management at the heart of a smarter, more connected world. In support of that goal, FlexPulse is a purpose-built platform which takes our supply chain data and delivers it in an insightful and actionable form. Join us to get an overview of our Pulse environment, its evolution, and how we partner with Tableau in our journey from data to Intelligence.

Why sit alone during lunch when you could chow down with your fellow IT professionals? Join Tableau's Michael Hetrick Tom Wasserman and Manish Agarwal, product marketing managers focused on supporting IT professionals like yourselves.