Impressions of Tableau Conference 2014

This was my first year attending the Tableau Conference. Luckily for me, the event was held in my hometown of Seattle, just a few blocks from the office. The event turnout surpassed previous years by far, and provided for a lively atmosphere. Originally kicking off 7 years ago with 180 people, the conference had grown to 3000 last year, and then to 5500 attendees this year.

The keynote speakers at this year’s conference had some great choices, consisting of Niel DeGrasse Tyson, Hans Rosling, Michael Lewis, and John Medina. It was interesting to hear from such a diverse group of individuals, for whom much of their successes stem from data analysis. Of the bunch, Michael Lewis seemed to have been the least relevant to the conference, as he only wrote books on other individuals who were revolutionary in their data analysis, and stated that he did not care too much for the actual data himself. On the other hand, the remaining three work with data on a day-to-day basis, and were able to speak a little bit more passionately about what analyzing it meant to them. I suppose Michael Lewis is one of the more famous of the bunch and provided a celebrity factor to help lure attendees.

There were over 270 breakout sessions that comprised of hands-on training sessions for various features in Tableau, demonstrations of how various companies such as Netflix use Tableau for data analysis, as well as a variety of other types of sessions regarding Tableau. The conference agenda did a good job of specifying the skill level, content type, user type, and industry that the various breakout sessions were targeting. This helped me determine which sessions were most relevant to my interests. Tableau also released the Data14 app, providing a very convenient way to keep track of the time, location, and any changes or cancellations for the breakout sessions.

A downside to the breakout sessions were how quickly they filled up. Showing up 5 – 10 minutes before a popular session often meant you were too late to get entry. For those that are planning attending next year, I’d recommend arriving at the sessions you want to get to at least 20 minutes early because they fill up fast. Leave other sessions 5 – 10 minutes early if you have to in order to do this. Perhaps Tableau will do a better job of estimating the turnout for the popular sessions next year and plan accordingly. Another thing I noticed was the limited number of opportunities to socialize with fellow event attendees. Aside from possibly striking up a conversation with someone over lunch, there was only one organized socializing event. It would’ve been nice to get to know members of the Tableau community a little better.

All in all the conference was an enjoyable experience and I look forward to next year’s conference. See you all same time next year in Vegas!

What to Expect From Tableau 9?

After attending the 7th Annual Tableau Conference this past September, I got a great overview of what’s to come in Tableau’s next big release – Tableau Desktop 9. Other than conference footage, Tableau has not released any official documentation on information regarding the product release date, or details on new features. For those who were not able to attend the conference this year, I thought I would provide summary on the upcoming features demoed during the conference. Below are the seven different areas Tableau is focusing development on for Tableau 9.

Visual Analytics – Visual analytics features in Tableau are getting revamped. Users can expect to see type-in shelves with autocomplete as an alternative to dragging and dropping fields, creating type-in calculations directly in the Rows and Column shelves, enhanced ease of use for building new analytics, and many more features. Below is a summarized list of what to expect.

• Type-in Shelves
• Freeform Calculations
• Autocomplete for Calculations
• Drag-and-Drop Calculations
• New Calculation Editor
• Drag-and-Drop Analytics
• Instant Reference Lines and Trend Lines
• Interactive Table Calculation Editing
• Geographic Search
• Lasso & Radial Selection

Performance – Tableau is going to be a lot faster at querying your data when building your viz’s. This means viewing tooltips by hovering between different data points will be a seamless experience, and multiple users viewing the same report can avoid processing times from repeat calculations by caching previous queries. This will make visualizations load instantly when running for the second time. Below is a summarized list of what to expect.

• Multi-core Query Execution
• Vector Operations Support
• Parallel Queries
• Continuous Tooltips
• Responsive Pan & Zoom
• Persistent Query Caches

Data Prep – Tableau is making big advancements in its abilities to process raw data. The goal is to reduce the ETL work often required before the report building can begin. Tableau 9 will be able to pull data from significantly unstructured Excel files consisting of merged cells, pivoted data, and other common formatting issues. Once the data is pulled in, users are able to un-pivot the data directly in the preview screen, as well as split out columns that are not properly delimited. In addition, Tableau is adding a Web Service API Connector, making it that much easier to pull data from the web directly into Tableau.

Storytelling – The Story Points feature was rolled out in Tableau 8.2. Although the idea was great, Story Points came with very little formatting capabilities. This likely hindered the adoption rate of this feature greatly. In Tableau 9, users can expect much greater flexibility when it comes to formatting their stories. This means you can manipulate the font, color, size, and positioning of your story captions, story backgrounds, and visualizations. In addition, when building the story, hovering over existing sheets and dashboards now provides a preview of what they look like, so the user doesn’t have to remember each of them by name. Although the new features here may be simple, they are large improvements from the first version rolled out in Tableau 8.2.

Enterprise – Tableau is aiming to make the user experience for enterprise users much easier. Tableau 9 will see enhancements in administrative tasks like modifying user permissions, making it a very simple and visual process, new design improvements to Tableau Server, as well as new function calls to its API, allowing programmers to automate many aspects of modifying Tableau Server without having to manually interact with the UI. Mainly, improvements in the below areas can be expected.

• High Availability
• Scalability
• Kerberos & Smart Cards Support (rolled out in 8.3)
• Performance
• Permissions

Cloud – Tableau 9 is making it much simpler to connect to cloud data sources, cloud applications, and on premise data all from in the cloud with Tableau Online. This is still while using 100% cloud-based infrastructure. This portion of the demo consisted of how Tableau Online can have a live cloud-to-cloud connection with big data sources like Amazon Redshift, showing data in charts that was only processed an hour beforehand. Single-sign on implementation to multiple data sources using OAuth was also shown. Lastly, we saw a quick preview of being able to embed dynamic Tableau reports directly into Salesforce.

Mobile –Tableau Mobile will be much faster than it used to be. The new app offers greater flexibility when building visualizations as well, building calculations to mobile and web for the very first time, allowing users to create their own metrics on the fly. The app will also allow for offline data viewing. The main portion of this demo, however, consisted of a new app in development called Project Elastic. Project Elastic allows you to pull in data directly into the app, with no server or cloud infrastructure in the background. This makes it very simple to open an Excel file emailed to you consisting of sales data, open it up in the Elastic app, and begin doing visual analysis immediately, all within the app.

The release date for Tableau 9 is not yet public but is rumored to launch during the first half of 2015.