As we get closer towards the thrills of this year’s Tableau Conference (#data16), I wanted to look back at one of the most fun parts of the last year’s conference – the “devs on stage” section. That’s the part where Tableau employees announce and demonstrate some of the new features that they’re working on. No guarantees are made as to whether they’ll ever see the light of day, let alone be in the next release – but, in reality, the audience gets excited enough that there’d probably be a riot if none of them ever turned up.
Having made some notes of what was shown in last year’s conference (which was imaginatively entitled #data15), I decided to review the list and see how many of those features have turned up so far. After all, it’s all very well to announce fun new stuff to a crowd of 10,000 over-excited analysts…but does Tableau tend to follow through on it? Let’s check!
(Please bear in mind that these are just the features I found significant enough to scrawl down through the jet-lag; it’s not necessarily a comprehensive review of what was on show.)
Improvements in the Data category:
| Feature | Does it exist yet? |
| Improvements to the automatic data cleanup feature recently released that can import Excel type files that are formatted in an otherwise painful way for analysis | Yes – Tableau 9.2 brought features like “sub-table detection” to its data interpreter feature |
| Can now understand hundreds of different date formats | Hmm…I’m not sure. I’ve not had any problems with dates, but then again I was lucky enough never to have many! |
| The Data Source screen will now allow Tableau to natively “union” data (as in SQL UNION), as well as join it, just by clicking and dragging. | Yes – Tableau 9.3 allows drag and drop unioning. But only on Excel and text files. Here’s hoping they expand the scope of that to databases in the future. |
| Cross-database joins | Yes, cross-database joins are in Tableau 10. |
Improvements in the Visualisation category:
| Feature | Does it exist yet? |
| Enhancements to the text table visualisation | Yes – Tableau 9.2 brought the ability to show totals at the top of columns, and 9.3 allowed excluding totals from colour-coding. |
| Data highlighter | Yes – Tableau 10 includes the highlighter feature. |
| New native geospatial geographies | Yes – 9.2 and 9.3 both added or updated some geographies. |
| A connector to allow connection to spatial data files | No – I don’t think I’ve seen this one anywhere. |
| Custom geographic territory creation | Yes – Tableau 10 has a couple of methods to let you do that. |
| Integration with Mapbox | Yes- Tableau 9.2 lets you use Mapbox maps. |
| Tooltips can now contain worksheets themselves. | No – not seen this yet. |
Improvements in the Analysis category:
| Feature | Does it exist yet? |
| Automatic outlier detection | No |
| Automatic cluster detection | Yes, that’s a new Tableau 10 feature |
| You can “use” reference lines / bands now for things beyond just static display | Hmm…I don’t recall seeing any changes in this area. No? |
Improvements in the Self-Service category:
| Feature | Does it exist yet? |
| There will be a custom server homepage for each user | Not sure – the look and feel of the home page has changed, and the user can mark favourites etc. but I have not noticed huge changes in customisation from previous versions. |
| There will be analytics on the workbooks themselves | Yes – Tableau 9.3 brought content analytics to workbooks on server.Some metadata is shown in the content lists directly, plus you can sort by view count. |
| Searching will become better | Yes – also came with Tableau 9.3. Search shows you the most popular results first, with indicators as to usage. |
| Version control | Yes – Tableau 9.3 brought workbook revision history for server, and Tableau 10 enhanced it. |
| Improvements to security UI | Yes – not 100% sure which version, but the security UI changed. New features were also added, such as setting and locking project permissions in 9.2. |
| A web interface for managing the Tableau server | Not sure about this one, but I don’t recall seeing it anywhere. I’d venture “no”, but am open to correction! |
Improvements in the Dashboarding category:
| Feature | Does it exist yet? |
| Improvements to web editing | Yes – most versions of Tableau since then have brought improvements here. In Tableau 10 you can create complete dashboards from scratch via the web. |
| Global formatting | Yes, this came in Tableau 10. |
| Cross datasource filtering | Yes, this super-popular feature also came with Tableau 10. |
| Device preview | Yes, this is available in Tableau 10. |
| Device specific dashboards. | Yes, also from Tableau 10. |
Improvements in the Mobile category:
| Feature | Does it exist yet? |
| A Tableau iPhone app | Yes – download it here. An Android app was also released recently. |
| iPad app – Vizable | Was actually launched at #data15, so yes, it’s here. |
Summary
Hey, a decent result! Most of the features demonstrated last year are already in the latest official release.
And for some of those that aren’t, such as outlier detection, it feels like a framework has been put in place for the possible later integration of them. In that particular case, you can imagine it being located in the same place, and working in the same way, as the already-released clustering function.
There are perhaps a couple that it’s slightly sad to see haven’t made it just yet – I’m mainly thinking of embedded vizzes in tooltips here. From the celebratory cheers, that was pretty popular with the assembled crowds when demoed in 2015, so it’ll be interesting to see whether any mention of development on that front is noted in this year’s talks.
There are also some features released that I’d like to see grow in scope – the union feature would be the obvious one for me. I’d love to see the ability to easily union database tables beyond Excel/text sources. And now we have cross-database joins, perhaps even unioning between different technology stacks.
Bonus points due: In my 2015 notes, I had mentioned that a feature I had heard a lot of colleague-interest in, that was not mentioned at all in the keynote, was data driven alerting; the ability to be notified only if your KPI goes wild for instance. Sales managers might get bored of checking their dashboards each day just to see if sales were down when 95% of the time everything is fine, so why not just send them an email when that event actually occurs?
Well, the exciting news on that front is that some steps towards that have been announced for Tableau 10.1, which is in beta now so will surely be released quite soon.
Described as “conditional subscriptions”, the feature will allow you to “receive email updates when data is present in your viz”. That’s perhaps a slight abstraction from the most obvious form of data-driven alerting. But it’s easy to see that, with a bit of thought, analysts will be able to build vizzes that give exactly the sort of alerting functionality my colleagues, and many many others in the wider world, have been asking for. Thanks for that, developer heroes!
Dabbling with Data 