Future features coming to Tableau 10.2 and beyond – that they didn’t blog about

Having slowly de-jetlagged from this year’s (fantastic and huge) Tableau conference, I’d settled down to write up my notes regarding the always-thrilling “what new features are on the cards?” sessions, only to note that Tableau have already done a pretty good job of summarising it on their own blog here, here and here.

There’s little point in my replicating that list verbatim, but I did notice that a few things that I’d noted down from the keynote announcements that weren’t immediately obvious in Tableau’s blog posts. I have listed some of those for below for reference. Most are just fine details, but one or two seem more major to me.

Per the conference, I’ll divide this up into “probably coming soon” vs “1-3 year vision”.

Coming soon:

Select from tooltip – a feature that will no doubt seem like it’s always been there as soon as we get it.

We can already customise tool tips to show pertinent information about a data point that don’t influence the viz itself. For example, if we’re scatter-plot analysing sales and profit per customer, perhaps we’d like to show whether the customer is a recent customer vs a long term customer in the tool tip when hovered over.

In today’s world, as you hover over a particular customer’s datapoint, the tooltip indeed may tell you that it’s a recent customer. But what’s the pattern in the other datapoints that are also recent customers?

In tomorrow’s world you’ll be able to click where it tells you “recent customer” and all the other “recent customers” in the viz will be highlighted. It’s nothing that you can’t get the same end result today with the use of the highlighter tool, but likely far more convenient in certain situations..

A couple of new web-authoring features, to add to the list on the official blog post.

1. You can create storypoints on the web
2. You’ll be able to enable full-screen mode on the web

Legends per measure: this might not sound all that revolutionary, but when you think it through, it enables this sort of classic viz: a highlighted table on multiple measures – where each measure is highlighted independently of the others.

Having average sales of £10000 doesn’t any more have to mean that the high customer age of 100 in the same table is highlighted as though it was tiny.

Yes, there are workarounds to make something that looks similar to the above today – but it’s one of those features that I have found those people yet to be convinced of the merits of Tableau react negatively to when it turns out it’s not a simple operation, after they compare it to other tools (Excel…). Whilst recreating what you made in another tool is often exactly the wrong approach to using a new tool, this type of display is one of the few I see a good case for making easy enough to create.

In the 1-3 year future:

Tableau’s blog does talk about the new super-fast data engine, Hyper, but doesn’t dwell on one cool feature that was demoed on stage.

Creating a Tableau extract is sometimes a slow process. Yes, Hyper should make it faster, but at the end of the day there are factors like remote database performance and network speed that might mean there’s simply no practical way to speed it up.  Today you’re forced to sit and stare at the extract creation process until it’s done.

Hyper, though, can do its extract-making process in the background, and let you use it piece-by-piece, as it becomes available.

So if you’re making an extract of sales from the last 10 years, but so far only the information from the last 5 years has arrived to the extract creation engine, you can already start visualising what happened in the last 5 years. Of course you’ll not be able to see years 6-10 at the moment, as it’s still winging its way to you through the wifi. But you can rest safe in the knowledge that once the rest of the data has arrived it’ll automatically update your charts to show the full 10 year range. No more excuses for long lunches, sorry!

It seems to me that this, and features like incremental refresh, also open the door to enabling near real-time analysis within an extract.

Geographic augmentation – Tableau can plot raw latitude and longitude points with ease. But in practice, they are just x-y points shown over a background display; there’s no analytical concept present that point x,y is part of the state of Texas whereas point y,z is within New York. But there will be. Apparently we will be able to roll up long/lat pairs to geographic components like zip, state, and so on, even when the respective dimension doesn’t appear in the data.

Web authoring – the end goal is apparently that you’ll be able to do pretty much everything you can do publishing-wise in Tableau Desktop on the web. In recent times, each iteration has added more and more features – but in the longer term, the aim is to get to absolute parity.

We were reassured that this doesn’t mean that the desktop product is going away; it’s simply a different avenue of usage, and the two technologies will auto-sync so that you could start authoring on your desktop app, and then log into a website from a different computer and your work will be there waiting for you, without the need to formally  publish it.

It will be interesting to see whether, and how, this affects licensing and pricing as today there is a large price differential between for instance a Tableau Online account and Tableau Desktop Professional, at least in year one.

And finally, some collaboration features on Tableau server.

The big one, for me, is discussions (aka comments).  Right alongside any viz when published will be a discussion pane. The intention is that people will be able to comment, ask questions, explain what’s shown and so on.

But, doesn’t Tableau Server already have this? Well, yes, it does have comments, but in my experience they have not been greatly useful to many people.

The most problematic issue in my view has been the lack of notifications. That is to say,  a few months after publishing a delightful dashboard, a user might have a question about a what they’re seeing and correctly pop a comment on the page displaying the viz. Great.

But the dashboard author, or whichever SME might actually be able to answer the question, isn’t notified in any way.  If they happen to see that someone commented by chance, then great, they can reply (note that the questioner will not be notified that someone left them an answer though). But, unless we mandate everyone in the organisation to manually check comments on every dashboard they have access to every day, that’s rather unlikely to be the case.

And just opening the dashboard up may not even be enough, as today they tend to be displayed “below the fold” for any medium-large sized dashboard. So comments go unanswered, and people get grumpy and stop commenting, or never notice that they can even comment.

The new system however will include @user functionality, which will email the user when a comment or question has been directed at them.  I’m also hoping that you’ll be able to somehow subscribe to dashboards, projects or the server such that you get notified if any comments are left that you’re entitled to see , whether or not you’re mentioned in them.

As they had it on the demo at least, the comments also show on the right hand side of the dashboard rather than below it – which given desktop users tend to have wide rather than tall screens should makes them more visible. They’ll also be present in the mobile app in future.

Furthermore, each time a comment is made, the server will store and show the state of the visualisation at that time, so that future readers can see exactly what the commenter was looking at when they made their comments. This will be great for the very many dashboards that are set up to autorefresh or allow view customisation.

(My future comment wishlist #1: ability to comment on an individual datapoint, and have that comment shown wherever that datapoint is seen).

Lastly, sandboxes. Right now, my personal experience has been that there’s not a huge incentive to publish work-in-progress to a Tableau server in most cases. Depending on your organisation’s security setup, anything you publish might automatically become public before you’re ready, and even if not, then unless you’re pretty careful with individual permissions it can be the case that you accidentally share your file too widely, or not widely enough, and/or end up with a complex network of individually-permissioned files that are easy to get mixed up.

Besides, if you always operate from the same computer, there’s little advantage (outside of backups) to publishing it if you’re not ready for someone else to look at it. But now, with all this clever versioning, recommendy, commenty, data-alerty stuff, it becomes much more interesting to do so.

So, there will apparently be a user sandbox; a private area on the server where each Tableau user can upload and work on their files, safe in the knowledge that what they do there is private – plus they can customise which dashboards, metrics and so on are shown when they enter their sandbox.

But, better yet, team sandboxes! So, in one click, you’ll be able to promote your dashboard-in-progress to a place where just your local analytics team can see it, for instance, and get their comments, feedback and help developing it, without having to fiddle around with setting up pseudo-projects or separate server installations for your team.

Furthermore, there was mention of a team activity newsfeed, so you’ll be able to see what your immediate team members have been up to in the team sandbox since you last took a peek. This should be helpful for raising awareness of what each team member is working on high, further enhancing the possibilities for collaboration and reducing the likelihood of duplicate work.

Finally, it’s mentioned on Tableau’s blogs, but I wanted to extend a huge cheer and many thanks for the forthcoming data driven alerting feature! Lack of this style of alerting and insufficient collaboration features were the two most common complaints I have heard about Tableau Server from people considering the purchase of something that can be decidedly non-trivial in cost. Other vendors have actually gone so far as to sell add-on products to try and add these features to Tableau Server, many of which are no doubt very good -but it’s simply impossible to integrate them into the overall Tableau install as seamlessly as Tableau themselves could do.

Now we’re in 2016, where the average Very Important And Busy Executive feels like they don’t have time to open up a dashboard to see where things stand, it’s a common and obvious feature request to want to be alerted only when there is actually something to worry about – which may then result in opening the dashboard proper to exploring what’s going on. And, I have no doubt, creative analysts are going to find any number of uses to put it to outside of the obvious “let me know if my sales are poor today”.

(My future data driven alert wishlist #1: please give include a trigger to the effect of “if this metric has an unusual value”, meaning to base it on a statistical calculation derived from on historic variance/std dev/ etc. rather than having to put a flat >£xxxx in as criteria).