Sessions

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.

In this talk, we’ll explore how we ensure that a customer's Tableau Server installations are secure. We’ll talk about our security model, how we encrypt secrets, how we secure communications and finally how to lock down your Tableau Server host machines to enhance security.

PG&E's Electric Distribution Operations had maxed out its reporting capabilities with Excel and Access. Yet, the business needed more data across different systems, and simplified insights and dashboards to make sense of it. Today, dashboards are refreshed daily for everyone from executive leadership to field employees. Join us on our journey as we designed new data architecture and tools from the beginning to support a rapidly changing organization. Learn how Tableau adoption requires as much social and relational capital as it does technical skills and visual acuity. We will also share our best practices for designing dashboards across a broad set of audiences.

Learn what joins look like in Tableau Prep. Here we will show you how to create joins, but more importantly, how to understand what your join has done. Even if you’re already a left-semi-anti-join expert, you’ll probably learn something about joining with Tableau Prep.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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.

This session will help you learn how to use customize API and PG scripts to manage server administration such as automate content administration, how to have two HOT HOT clusters which can help achieve 0% down-time, different ways to speed-up content migration between different clusters, on-demand cache management based on freshness of the data and much more.

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.

You know what Level of Detail (LOD) Expressions are. You know how to use them. But have you mastered them, Jedi-style? In this session, we’ll tackle real-world challenges, and solve them via the application of LOD Expressions. Come prepared with prior experience using LODs and a comfortable understanding between the different LOD types (FIXED, EXCLUDE, and INCLUDE).

Providence Health is one of the largest healthcare systems in the US, challenged with delivering the highest quality of care enabling superior patient outcomes at the lowest cost.

In this presentation, Providence Health will present their Value Oriented Architecture (VOA) built with Tableau, to concurrently present and correlate the cost-of-care and meaningful clinical outcomes (“value”) using an apples-to-apples comparison across different providers. This enables a deep dive into the variances in outcomes and costs, and root causes thereof, to proactively address these and drive performance improvement. Learn how the physician-designers of the VOA partnered with clinicians across a 50 hospital system to create and deliver a Self-Service Visual Analytics platform for practice transparency and best practice discovery that is enabling superior performance and outcomes at a lower cost.

In this session, we are going to dig into how to make data most relevant to you. Tableau is all about having the right people seeing the right data at the right time. You will be learning about the fundamentals of filtering, how and when to use filters, and potential use cases. Prior basic knowledge about Tableau Desktop user interface would be helpful but not necessary.  

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.

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

Tableau Prep is like an iceberg—90% of its operation is below the water where you can't see it. How does Tableau Prep do what it does? Does data actually "flow through" nodes? Where are the performance bottlenecks? How will it scale? Find out here.

To answer all the questions regarding movie performance from studios, Fandango has developed “Studio Portal” application, which is a collection of insights to be used by various departments within Fandango as well as External Studio. These dashboards give insights of how a movie is performing compared to other movies before and after release. We will walk you through our journey from inception to a finished product and its adoption.
You will learn about:

• Identifying the opportunity to build data products that solve for repetitive adhoc questions.
• Creating interactive and visually appealing dashboards.
• Packaging dashboards into a product that you can monetarize.
• How to inspire your customers to self-serve

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.

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.

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.

Join this session to explore the scientific underpinnings of what enables people to understand data quickly and effectively (and how Tableau helps them get there). Gain the tips and tricks necessary for authoring content that your viewers will appreciate.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you know you have to deal with dashboard performance, but don't even know where to start, then this session is for you. We will provide the tried-and-tested method of how to deal with performance issues. What must you do before you talk to the DBA? What are things you can deal with on your own? What are the most common mistakes that lead to performance issues in vizzes? We will take an extremely slow dashboard and peel through the layers as we make it more efficient together.

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.

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!

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.

Your organization is moving towards a model of self-service and that's awesome! But in your effort to give your team access to all the data they could possibly want, things have gotten... complicated. Learn some new tips and tricks on how to build in instructions and tutorials into your complex workbooks to help your organization teach themselves to have conversations with their data.

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

Join us for a special networking opportunity to talk about all things around embedding Tableau. Don't miss this great opportunity to connect with Tableau developers, ask questions, and provide feedback that can make a difference.

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.

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.

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.

As the industry leader and pioneer of mobile satellite communications, Inmarsat has been powering global connectivity for four decades. In 2016, Inmarsat purchased Tableau licenses for the business and paid off the entire investment with one simple workbook. But where do you go from there? The trouble with a six-figure ROI within 12 months is the expectation for better in year two. Come along to this session to hear how Inmarsat employees are building on this previous success story and see dashboards that are worth their weight in gold.

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

Get ready to amp up your geographic data skills! This session spearheads mapping in Tableau. Learn the basic features of maps within Tableau, best practices, and visual customization features using your favorite movie data. We'll teach you the basics of mapping in Tableau Desktop, map latitude and longitude points, paths within your own data, and how to build multi-layered maps using dual axes, out-of-the-box map layers, and custom background images.

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.

Do you have dashboards that take a painfully long time to load? Have you been told that Tableau can't handle large data sets or that you need to pre-aggregate your data in order for it to load quickly? At IBM Watson Health we deal with large data sets that can exceed 100 million rows and have learned some best practices and "tricks" to help dashboards load and perform without the need of pre-aggregating data (and losing key functionality). In this session we will share our real-world lessons learned in tuning Tableau workbook for optimal performance.

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.

Have you ever sat down to make a dashboard and weren’t sure where to start? Designing the perfect dashboard for your audience is easy if you have the right information. Professional Services Consultant Tara Morton blends techniques for establishing rapport by helping people clarify and address their business questions. In this session, explore how to come out of that pivotal meeting with everything you need to make your executives cry tears of joy.

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

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.

How excited were you when we released Viz in Tooltip? Little did you know that you can take this beautiful feature much further than just inserting it in a tooltip. We've come a long way since its first release, and the community has done some impressive things with it. In this session, we'll teach you how to make your Viz in Tooltip beautiful, interactive, multi-levelled, drill-able, zoom-able, conditional and more.

Would you like to know what kinds of design explorations and decisions went into building Tableau Prep? This session will explore the early ideas and prototypes that led to V1.

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."

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!