Sessions

The Kobayashi Maru is a training exercise in the Star Trek universe designed to test how people handle “a no-win scenario”. Well, here at Tableau, much like Captain Kirk, we’re stubborn enough to believe that there’s no such thing. In this session, we’re going to explore things that have been previously widely considered “impossible” in Tableau, and get creative about how to solve these previously unsolvable problems. This session will involve: utilization of Tableau Prep for data manipulation, advanced joins, blending, table calculations, data densification, and Level of Detail expressions in order to progress through these problems. An advanced understanding of fundamental Tableau concepts is highly recommended to get the most out of this session, as we will assume attendees will have run into some of these common Tableau roadblocks before. 

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.

As seen in devs on stage, Tableau is bringing powerful new capabilities to interactive analytics. The applications for interactive statistics are profound. For example, identifying time series that are most highly correlated with a selection, cluster analysis applied to interactive outlier detection, baselining a stock’s performance against the market in general, correlating market value of players to their team’s performance in the World Cup, and tracking the turnover of (or time to resell) a selected cohort of properties. We recommend also attending “Ready, Set, Action” for an introduction to concepts applied in this session.

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.  

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 one of the top-rated sessions for TC17 and TC16, Tableau Zen Masters Andy Kriebel and Jeffrey Shaffer raced the clock and counted Tableau tips. Andy and Jeff are stepping it up for TC18 and will be attempting 50 charts in 50 minutes. Don't miss this fast-paced and fun session.

TC18 welcomes Ryan Sleeper, Tableau Zen Master, Tableau Iron Viz Champion, and Tableau Public Visualization of the Year author. Ryan is here to share why he strives to be a “master of checkers” by focusing on the fundamentals of data visualization. He will share many tips from this new book: "Practical Tableau." During this session, you’ll learn how to make beautiful bar charts, lovely line graphs, leverage psychological schemas to improve your data visualization, and more!

We, the Data Management Team at Barnes-Jewish Hospital, are confident that we have achieved what we set out to do: acquired the right technologies, developed the appropriate skills and hired the right people to take us on that journey. Today, we can take on any project, any size of data, and can transform them into valuable information to support daily operations as well as business decisions at all levels in the healthcare setting. In this presentation, we will focus on our journey’s evolution from the early challenges to the triumphant outcomes. We will also highlight several key transformational technical projects which help us complete our mission every day. Finally, we will demonstrate how choosing and integrating the right technologies, Tableau and the Vertica Analytics Platform, played a key factor in our success.

Crete Carrier Corporation is a national trucking company. After going to Tableau Conference last year, we realized that we have untapped potential to use geodata to improve our workflow. With Tableau beginning to introduce Microsoft SQL Spatial Data into the product lineup, there was no better time to start working on this. In this session we will walk you through our journey of spatial data implementation and share specific use cases. We'll discuss identifying available geodata, how to store that data in MSSQL for use in Tableau, and how to run various spatial queries to display in Tableau.

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).

Tipping Point Community works to break the cycle of poverty for individuals and families in the San Francisco Bay Area. We leverage the resources and expertise of our community to invest in solutions that prevent poverty. Since 2005, Tipping Point has raised nearly $200 million to support the 1.3 million people in the Bay Area who are too poor to meet their basic needs. In this presentation, we'll demonstrate how we leveraged Trifacta to wrangle large education data sets, in order to visualize and analyze the data in Tableau. Visualizations and analyses are only as good as the data that powers them. You’ll learn how the combined use of Trifacta and Tableau increased our ability to analyze, predict and visualize education data and accelerated time-to-insights.

Join this session to learn more about each of the four different calculation types in Tableau. This session is designed for those who would like to take the 'analytics' in their 'visual analytics' to the next level.

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).

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.

Join this session to get a peek into how Nest's centralized analytics function was conceived, structured, and scaled over the last 6 years. This session will touch on key learnings around technology, mindset, and approach -- all of which helped us "drive the business" in a rapidly expanding and evolving environment. Please come by in person, as this presentation will not be recorded!

Wondering when to use a calculated field, and LOD expression, or a table calculation? This session is for you. Come sleuth the right answers, and learn the principles behind applying specific methods to specific problems. You should have basic experience in table calculations.

Embark on a journey where you learn how to create correlation matrices, analyze international policy using line similarity analysis, check if your data are normally distributed using Q-Q plots, analyze wealth disparity with variable-width histograms, calculate hypothesis tests, and convert complicated mathematical formulas into Tableau calculated fields. This training is appropriate for those who have a strong familiarity with Tableau Desktop (many examples use extremely complex Table Calculations and/or LODs) and a basic understanding of statistics.

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

Level of detail expressions (LOD) in Tableau introduce an abundance of capabilities for curious data geeks who wish to push the boundaries of Tableau. This session will demonstrate "LODs of fun" techniques, including enabling single member drill down, search across a hierarchy, one-click drill down on maps, market basket analysis, and other filter scenarios.

Do you and your organization have diverse, rapidly scaling (billions trending to trillions of rows!) longitudinal, data sets that need to be unified so that your ideas can be tested and for the most pressing, non-routine business questions to be answered almost as soon as you ask them? Are you already utilizing Tableau’s “gold standard” visual analytics, but get bogged down behind the scenes with data integration and prep, that only gets worse the more data scale and sources you have?

At 1010data, we offer a Best-In-Class, self-service, “spreadsheet style”, iterative data analytics cloud solution delivered at scale that fits seamlessly into any pre-existing modern technology ecosystem. Our products and solutions, built on our Trillion Row SpreadsheetTM analytics engine, are easy to use and learn whether you're a data scientist, business analysts, delivering accurate and detailed intelligence for executive decision making, and enabling robust and secure data monetization opportunities across your ecosystem.

We believe as competitive landscapes only get more complex with every day, companies will require an integrated blend of connected, scalable, and self-service technologies and data to win. You are already leveraging Tableau's best-in-class data visualization. Integrating 1010data with your Tableau capabilities brings the best of both worlds of being able to rapidly and easily analyze and visualize all your data at massive scale!

Have you ever needed to create data out of thin air? Call it what you want: pad, scaffold or skeleton - sometimes we need to fill the gaps in our data because data that’s stored efficiently isn’t data stored effectively for the complex business questions we’re tasked with answering. In this session, we’ll explore how cross database joins and Tableau Prep can be used to make performing time-based analysis simple.

The ability to enrich Tableau’s powerful visualizations with flexible, secure content has enabled Archetype Consulting customers to realize their own data exploration, insight generation, and constituent service-level goals. In this presentation you'll see Python integration via TabPy server, which can be used to invoke Python libraries for numerical computation, advanced analyses, and machine learning (e.g. Numpy, SciPy, Pandas, and Scikit-learn). Our Python scripts are stored as TabPy server endpoints for ease of use inside Tableau, as well as change management and migration between environments. We'll also share an approach to provide value-added content alongside Tableau Server, including high interest dashboard marks that drill down to secure content generated in real-time. This end-to-end framework for rich content delivery applies both to public datasets and enterprise environments.

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.

Still sorting your drags from your drops? Still mixing your dimensions with your measures? This session has your newbie name all over it. Come tackle the fundamentals of Tableau, including how to connect to data, answer statistical questions, build maps, and apply some table calculations in a dashboard you can take with you at the end of the session.

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!

Learn how trading floor risk management is digitally transforming through Tableau at ScotiaBank. In this session, explore topics such as: - Tableau in financial markets and on a trading floor - Tableau Desktop and Server solutions for corporate restrictions on data access and security - Tableau Server Data sources and how they helped limit corporate red tape, simplify access to big data and bypass slow database issues - Event-based triggers for data extraction, faster performance (caching) and audit trail (PDF generation) through tabcmd - Simple analytics to higher management and regulator (Federal Reserve) reporting

"We've got gadgets and gizmos aplenty
we've got whozits and whatzits galore
(You want thingamabobs?
We've got twenty)
But who cares?
No big deal
You want more"

At Disney Parks & Resorts Merchandise, we support analytics for our world-renowned theme parks, cruise, and Vacation Club offerings. From global park sales to individual item-level detail at a single store, our data needs range from determining how many glass slippers to order for the first royal ball to optimizing Arrendale in the event of another ice storm. Join us to be inspired, break away from typical designs, and walk through our Store Performance dashboard design project. This session will show the evolution of our designs, uncover the thought process, and inspire you to create more fun and magical designs.

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.

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.

In this session, you will learn how to analyze metrics over different periods of time using advanced table and date calculations (e.g. for year to date vs. previous year to date comparison). You will get to know best practices for visualizing KPI's and actual versus target analysis, and how to combine these visualizations into a well-structured scorecard.

Actions in Tableau put the interactive in Data Analysis! This session aims to provide a solid foundation for building rich dashboard applications and will cover best-practices for using Actions. At the end of this session, you will be able effectively consider and apply various interactive techniques, including action triggers and behavior within and across sheets. We’ll discuss: selection, filtering highlighting, navigation, and the *new* set action feature. We will also cover parameters, instant analytics, tooltips, and more!  

The insurance market is a competitive space. The General, an insurance company focused on providing affordable high-quality auto insurance, turned to analytics and data science for their edge. By using Alteryx + Tableau together, they overhauled their standard reporting process, creating such a seamless experience that many end-users can’t tell where Alteryx ends and Tableau begins. The General revolutionized their standard annual reporting process and turned it into a state-of-the-art analytics feat that delivers insights on a rolling 12-month basis. Join this session to learn how The General’s cross-functional team collaborated and leveraged the award-winning Alteryx platform to modernize forecasting through analytics and data science, breaking data barriers, delivering more impactful insights, and allowing their team to experience the thrill of getting to the answer faster.

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.

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

Discover how to enhance collaboration between data scientists and business users. We will show how the integration between Tableau Server and R/Python will empower both types of users to complement each other’s skill sets and validate each other’s findings. Learn how to scale your deployment to larger audiences with best practices surrounding load balancing as well as performance optimization. We welcome both business users and data scientists to learn about the art of the possible when you combine advanced analytics with the Tableau experience you have come to expect in your enterprise.

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

Calling all business-minded brainiacs. For those who’ve pondered insights such as “How does one department’s percentage contribution compare to total revenue?” or “How did one division's contribution change over time?”, this session is for you. Acquire deeper analysis abilities via Table Calculations We’ll run you through the basics—how they work, when to use them, why they’re helpful, etc. Attendees should be able to write basic calculations and build basic visualizations for this session.

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.

How do you feel about more end-user interactivity in your dashboards? If the answer’s “pretty good,” this session is your jam. Parameters enable you to create user inputs that can adjust measures, swap dimensions, hide worksheets, build conditional logic, and much more. Join us as we explore parameters—from the ground up. (We’ll even toss in a few sophisticated parameter use cases.) Expect to leave knowing simple uses of parameters (such as moving averages, what-if analysis, adjusting KPIs, and top N filters), and more complex uses like swapping fields within a chart and swapping charts within a dashboard.

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.

The session will examine ProSight’s data analytics journey, exploring challenges as a growing firm, and how we addressed them using Tableau to gain useful insights into our data. It will walk through process improvement initiatives implemented as a result of end users now having access to data that supports their previously unsupported assertions. We will provide insights into how we replaced our enterprise financial reporting tool with Tableau in under four months, reducing costs by 53%, improving speed of data availability by 43% and reducing error rates due to gaps in systems interfaces by 40%. Using Tableau, we reduced the time to integrate new data sources from months to days, enabling a culture of transparency and ownership.

Ready to master the art of Tableau? In this session, learn best practices for visual analysis in Tableau, master some core Tableau concepts, and gain useful tips that'll ensure you become a data rock star. You'll discover more about preparing your data in Tableau, customizing fields in your data, exploring your data by asking questions and building views to find answers, creating dynamic views and filtering views, and building interactive dashboards.

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!

Are you an intrepid Tableau explorer? Do you want to go further than standard Tableau mapping can take you? Push the boundaries of Tableau’s mapping capabilities with us as we dive into the intricacies of how Tableau handles geographic data, the limitations thereof, and how to manipulate data to overcome said limitations to create map masterpieces. We’ll put the rubber to the road with spatial joins, MapBox, path, distance and radial mapping, and more. Join us and witness the madness!

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.

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).