Tableau’s Latest Product Updates
May 7, 2024 — I had the pleasure of chatting with Southard Jones, Chief Product Officer of Tableau at Salesforce, on the DATAcated Show (#TableauSponsored).
Those who know me KNOW how excited I was to partner with Tableau. This was the first data visualization tool I used and was a big part of my data career launch over 10 years ago. I was thrilled to hear about some of the new features that were announced last week at the Tableau Conference and honored for the opportunity to connect with Southard to get a recap of those product updates.
Here are the highlights from our conversation:
Southard started by setting the stage around the various waves of analytics.
- First Wave: Initially, insights were gained by asking tech specialists to create static reports, often in formats like PDFs, which were not conducive to quick iteration or deeper analysis.
- Second Wave: Marked by the rise of self-service analytics, this wave empowered more individuals to directly access and manipulate data, drastically speeding up data interaction and analysis.
- Third Wave: Focused on personalization, this wave aims to deliver data insights in ways that are directly relevant and integrated into the user’s workflow, making data more actionable in real-time.
- Fourth Wave: The upcoming wave aims to combine governance, trust, and personalized insights, providing a comprehensive and agile approach to data analytics that meets the nuanced needs of various decision makers.
Southard Jones shared more details about several of Tableau’s new features and enhancements.
Here is a quick overview of the highlights:
- Tableau Public Desktop Edition (with local file saving) — Introduction of an updated Tableau Public edition that offers robust capabilities for individual users to do personal work in Tableau Public. I used Tableau Public as my very first data visualization tool in 2014 and I’m thrilled to hear that we can save files locally — so I can manage my personal private data, such as financial or health data.
- Viz Extensions — Enhancements to visualization extensions to offer more flexibility and customization. We can create Sankey Charts without calculated fields — that’s SUPER cool!
- Integration with Microsoft Teams — Improved capabilities for collaboration directly through Microsoft Teams. Tableau is in fact a “team player” and lives up to its word of meeting people ‘where they are’.
- Einstein Copilot for Tableau — Introduction of AI features from Einstein to assist users in data analysis. This seems like a great feature for those that might not be ready for the ‘drag-and-drop’ of pills and marks, measures, and dimensions. This simplifies the process and reduces the gap for data literacy. This feature allows users to interact with data through natural English language queries, not just SQL or complex queries.
- Composable Data Sources — Features to allow more modular and flexible handling of data within Tableau. As Southard said, “It’s been one of the desired features for a long time for the community. It essentially allows you to bring together different data sources that, when you first started your analysis, you didn’t necessarily know you’re going to bring them together. We just made it really easy and very simple to do and also correct and accurate”.
- Data Source Management: Improvements were made to annotate and catalog data sources, making them easier to search and manage. This helps in maintaining data accuracy and trust, which are key for effective data analysis.
It was such a pleasure chatting with Southard Jones from Tableau — you can watch the full 30-min interview here.
Check out the Tableau Conference Keynote sessions here (there are even MORE updates in there than we could squeeze into our chat).
I highly encourage you to check out Tableau here. You can even try it for FREE!
