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Insights from the Tableau Conference in San Diego
795 Plays6 months ago
Welcome to a solo episode! In this special episode of the podcast, I talk about the recen Tableau Customer conference in San Diego, which drew over 9,000 participants. I reflect on various aspects of the conference, including its diverse sessions that ranged from showcasing new Tableau features and case studies to hands-on workshops and discussions on data visualization beyond Tableau. I was a presenter at TC and presented my work on the Urban Institute’s Do No Harm Project.
My review of the conference focuses just on the positives of the conference—the upcoming features in Tableau, such as allowing Tableau Public users to save work their locally, as well as some thoughts on why I—who is not a huge Tableau user—actually attends the conference. I also discuss a few of the sessions I attended, including hands-on sessions and games in Tableau.
Topics Discussed
- Conference Overview: A recap of the Tableau Conference, highlighting its scale with over 9,000 participants and the variety of sessions that catered to both seasoned data analysts and newcomers to the field.
- Tableau’s New Features. Significant updates to Tableau, including the ability for Tableau Public users to save work locally – a feature that potentially redefines the need for Tableau Desktop licenses. I also talk about the introduction of customizable themes, Google Fonts integration, VIS Extensions, and the leaps in AI and real-time data integration within Tableau.
- Community and Networking: I reflect on the value of the community that Tableau fosters, especially through networking opportunities that are more crucial than ever in the post-pandemic era.
➡️ Check out more links, notes, transcript, and more at the PolicyViz website.
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Transcript
Reflections on Tableau Conference
00:00:12
Speaker
Welcome back to the Policy Vis podcast. I'm your host, John Schwabisch. On this week's episode of the show, you get a short episode and you get it just with me. That's right, I am back from the Tableau Conference in San Diego just a few weeks ago. And I thought I would take a few minutes to record a short episode of just myself with some reflections on the conference. Now, if you've never been to the Tableau Conference before,
00:00:39
Speaker
It is pretty tremendous. There were over 9,000 people at this year's conference. I have been, I think this is my third or fourth time attending. It's a great time. It's really interesting. Obviously, especially if you're immersed in the Tableau community, of which I would say I'm not that deep in the Tableau community. I do use Tableau as one of my tools to create visualizations, but I wouldn't say I'm super deep or super experienced with the tool.
00:01:07
Speaker
And of course, when you get to the Tableau conference, you have lots of people who are very enthusiastic about using Tableau and extending it and pushing the boundaries of what it can do and how it's used. I wouldn't say I go that far in my use of Tableau, but I do enjoy the conference. I do enjoy seeing old friends and making new friends. And so I thought I would take just a bit of time out of your podcast listening to share some observations and reflections on the conference.
00:01:33
Speaker
Now, I'm not going to talk about some of the negative pieces. This is just going to be a positive podcast episode. So there are some things that I would love to change about the conference or about how this thing works or that thing works. But I will say overall, it's just a great conference and kudos to the event managers and coordinators at Salesforce and Tableau who put
Conference Experience and Acknowledgments
00:01:53
Speaker
it together. It really is just a fantastic experience, especially when it's a tech conference and it's, you know, not a music festival, although sometimes it does feel like that.
00:02:01
Speaker
So I want to talk about just a few things. So first off on the features, the new features of Tableau. So if you've never been to the Tableau conference, the basically the way it works is there's a number. And when I say a number, I mean like hundreds of concurrent sessions and the concurrent sessions run. I think there are three of them. There's a 20 minute session, a 40 minute session, I think a 90 minute session.
00:02:24
Speaker
And so there's all these sessions going on concurrently and it can be kind of overwhelming to figure out where you want to spend your time because you have some sessions that are focused on Tableau features and new things that are coming out or things that people have built. There's also case studies of how people in organizations are using Tableau in their work. And then there's also the hands-on workshops where you are actually working in Tableau. And typically, although not always typically,
00:02:51
Speaker
This is an employee from Salesforce or Tableau giving the presentation and doing the tutorial. And so they might be teaching things like how to add accessibility into your dashboard, which is one of the hands on sessions that I attended. Or they might be teaching you how to use actions or use filters or use parameters and you're actually working in the tool itself.
00:03:12
Speaker
And then there's your sort of other presentations that are not necessarily focused on Tableau specifically, but on the broader ecosystem of data or data visualization sort of more broadly. And that's sort of where I've always presented a Tableau at this conference.
00:03:27
Speaker
I presented my work on the Urban Institute's Dunno Harm Guide around sexual orientation and gender identity data. That work, that Dunno Harm Guide project, it was funded by the Tableau Foundation, which now unfortunately no longer exists once Salesforce completed the purchase of Tableau. But I did a 40-minute session on my research on those types of data.
00:03:49
Speaker
So you have all these concurrent sessions going on. And then they also have sort of the flagship keynote address. And the keynote address this year was in a huge room at the San Diego Conference Center. Last year was in Vegas at an arena. So you've got all nine, 10,000 people in this single room.
00:04:05
Speaker
And you have the leaders of Salesforce and Tableau
New Tableau Features and AI Integration
00:04:09
Speaker
giving the talk. So you have the CEO of Tableau. You have the heads of different departments coming in and talking about different features and different things. And then what I think is kind of the most exciting part for those of us who are in the weeds of data and data vis and working in the tools is what they call devs on stage. And devs on stage are the Tableau developers who come out and one by one sort of walk you through
00:04:31
Speaker
some of the new features that are out in Tableau. And so that's a pretty exciting part for those of us who are working in the tool, especially those who are really deep into Tableau, but also for those of us like myself who want to see what the new things are. So from my count, there are lots of different things that they focused on.
00:04:50
Speaker
But from my count, there are kind of three or four things that I think are going to be important. I don't know about game changing, but they're going to be important for your average Tableau user. They did focus a lot, as one would expect, on artificial intelligence and how AI is being used in Tableau and the suite of tools. I'm not going to talk about that. I mean, I'm sure there's lots of stuff going on behind the scenes. But the things that to me really stood out
00:05:17
Speaker
was first on Tableau Public, you're now going to be able to save your workbooks and your dashboards locally. I mean, that is a huge, a huge change for Tableau, right? I mean, one of the things I've always told people about Tableau is you don't have to buy it. You can always go get Tableau Public, but when you save your work, it saves up to their servers or it saves up to the cloud. So you never want to use administrative data or private data. You might not even want to use
00:05:43
Speaker
You want to be careful because you don't get to hold that work the way you do when you use a tool like Tableau Desktop. But now with Tableau Public enabling you to save locally onto your machine, it's almost the same thing as Tableau Desktop.
00:06:01
Speaker
is curious to me, and I'm not exactly sure how this is going to work out, is why would someone now purchase a license to Tableau Desktop? What is the value of making that purchase? Which, by the way, it's not a cheap tool when you could use Tableau Public. And I'm sure there are some aspects of Tableau Desktop and Cloud, and especially Tableau Server, that are advantageous relative to Tableau Public. But again, for your average user,
00:06:26
Speaker
who's creating your dashboard or workbook that you're, especially if you're using it in your own company, if you're using it to better understand your data with your colleagues or your manager or your team, maybe Tableau Public is gonna be sufficient for those use cases. So I think that's a big, big change. And it'll be interesting to see, I think, how that sort of evolves over the next year or six months.
00:06:49
Speaker
Another change, another added feature, I'm going to group these together, was they're incorporating customized themes and customized Google fonts into Tableau. Now I'm going to group those together because they're sort of that style aesthetic thing. From my perspective, this has been a long time coming. The fact that, you know, not all.
00:07:07
Speaker
fonts sort of load the same way on the Tableau website or when embedded as they do on Tableau desktop on your website. Now they will be pulling from Google fonts. I believe that's a huge change as well. That'll allow more customization and obviously themes is a big thing where you can create your customized theme for your team or your organization. I mean that that's also a big one. I'm sure lots of people have
00:07:31
Speaker
worked around the fact that there isn't sort of a built-in theme already where you, you know, sort of create a template for your Tableau dashboards, but that you could have one already sort of built into the tool the way you can and lots of other tools, you know, even Excel and data wrapper and flourish and lots of other tools, especially ours, a great example of building a theme.
00:07:54
Speaker
that you just load. This seems like a long time coming and I think it'll be a good addition to the tool going forward.
00:08:03
Speaker
OK, another big one, big announcement at the Tableau conference was this extensions and this extensions are essentially like Microsoft Office add-ins, right? So if you, for example, the one that I have in my Microsoft package is the noun project. If you buy an annual subscription to the noun project, so if you like icons, highly recommend the noun project. If you buy the annual subscription, which I do, and it's like 40 bucks for the year, unlimited icons, totally worth it.
00:08:32
Speaker
If you buy the subscription, you can buy a little add in for Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint where the tools just integrated right into into those two tools. And so what these this extensions are going to be as it appears at least is that these are third party created apps essentially.
00:08:53
Speaker
that will enable you to extend the capabilities of Tableau. And so one of the great ones that I saw is from Tristan Guillivan over at La Data Vis. If you don't know about Tristan's work, I did interview him several months ago about some of the online Tableau work he's been doing where you could create a network diagram on his site and then download the Tableau workbook.
00:09:14
Speaker
that's gonna be built directly now into Tableau. And so I think that's gonna be amazing. I didn't see any discussion, and it probably wasn't the right forum for it, but I didn't see any discussion of how they are going to vet those extensions, who's gonna be allowed to enter that marketplace, how payment works on those. So that'll be kind of interesting to see how that shakes out.
00:09:37
Speaker
At least with Tristan's work, I haven't explored the other extensions. My understanding right now is that there are three companies that have extensions in the Tableau tool. At least in Tristan's work, he's created an extension that enables you to create things like a Sankey diagram and a network diagram directly into Tableau. And so you'll just load your data in the way you
00:09:59
Speaker
Create any Tableau dashboard and it'll just be built in in that visit extension. You just sort of click the button and you'll get yourself a network diagram, which is a great great addition to the tool. I think expands the capabilities obviously of what you can do in Tableau and makes in such a way that you don't have to
00:10:15
Speaker
You know, for example, go to Tristan site, do something there, download it and move it into Tableau. It'll be built directly into that one tool. That I think is a great addition. So for me, those are the three big things that I saw, the ability to download and use Tableau Public on your desktop, on your site.
00:10:35
Speaker
are on your computer locally. The addition of new themes and integrated fonts on the web, I think those are, that's big. And then I think this this extensions thing is going to also be big because it's going to enable us to create different types of visualizations. I'm sure over time, there'll be more templates. There'll be other things that'll be built in that, you know, will enable you to, to put things right into Tableau. And I can think of some right off the top of my head. And if I knew how to build them, I would go ahead and do it, but
00:11:01
Speaker
but I'll wait for others who know what they're doing before I even bother. So that was the one thing that I want to talk about, the
Real-Time Metrics and Slack Integration
00:11:11
Speaker
big additions. The second thing I want to talk about was the integration of Tableau Pulse and AI into the tool. So Tableau Pulse is kind of a real time, I'm going to get the definition run here, but I would encourage you to check it out and I'll put the links to the show notes.
00:11:27
Speaker
on the policy of this site. But Tableau Pulse really is enabling you to do sort of like real-time metrics. And the tutorial that I sat through, the sort of talk that I sat through was integrating Tableau Pulse directly into Slack. And this was really interesting, right? You could create a little visualization. You can think about it like a little sparkline or a little ban or a little visualization that integrates right into your Slack. And it might be pulling in, for example, real-time web metrics on your site.
00:11:55
Speaker
And so that's pulling in right into your teams, right into your Slack workspace. And then what's also really cool is that they have their Einstein artificial intelligence tool that is prompting you, prompting the user with questions to ask, and then it's providing those answers. And I think that, that of course is really, I think at the moment where I've seen a lot of use of chat GPT,
00:12:20
Speaker
And text AI, which is, you know, asking these prompting questions, you know, you sort of get the first level sort of basic questions and then you can dive in even further. And so that was a really interesting tutorial, really interesting talk that I sat through. I would say personally for me, I don't work with real time data. So didn't have a lot of, I couldn't see any, a lot of like immediate payoff for my work or for, for my teammates.
00:12:41
Speaker
But I could see certainly if you are in that world of tracking real-time data, and real-time can be daily data or weekly data, the social sciences move a lot slower than a lot of folks working in business and marketing and web analytics. But I could see that having a real benefit to those folks.
00:13:01
Speaker
The third thing, the last thing I want to talk about was a question I got while out
Motivations and Networking Opportunities
00:13:05
Speaker
one night. And as I mentioned, I'm not a huge Tableau user, right? I dabble, I would say, and I've tried many things and I really do like the tool, but I don't use it for everything because a lot of my work doesn't require interactivity, doesn't require dashboarding, requires sort of your more standard one-off graphs.
00:13:23
Speaker
But I do love really going to the conference because there's not a lot of data visualization conferences now. After the pandemic, we've sort of narrowed down into just a handful. And so I do get to see a lot of great friends and chat and hang out for a bit. But someone did ask me while we were out, why?
00:13:39
Speaker
For all those reasons I just mentioned, why do I go to the Tableau conference? If I'm not a Tableau developer, or if I'm not creating dashboards all the time, if I'm not creating dashboards for clients, why am I attending the Tableau conference? What do I get out of it? And I think there's a few reasons why I go. One is I like to see what's going on with the tools. I like to see how they're changing, how they're adapting to new technologies. I think AI is the obvious one there.
00:14:04
Speaker
and I'd like to see how they are changing the field and responding to customers' needs. I mean, I have a lot of clients and people who reach out to me to ask, you know, what are the data visualization tools that I would recommend? And Tableau always comes up, but I always tell them, you know, you don't have to pay the $1,500 or the $2,000 for a license. You can always get Tableau public. But there's this caveat because your data are saved up to the cloud.
00:14:28
Speaker
Now, when it's saved locally, that changes the calculus a little bit, right? You want to create a dashboard, Tableau Public might be the right solution to you because A, it's free, and B, now you can save locally. That does change the calculus. So I like to see what's going on in the field by attending a conference like Tableau. Again, obviously, I've done some work with Tableau, the Tableau Foundation, in the past, and so I think it's important for me to sort of just stay attached to the community.
00:14:55
Speaker
And Tableau and Salesforce as well have both been really supportive of the Do No Harm equity work that I've been doing at the Urban Institute over the last three years. And so I think it's important to try, at least to apply, to speak at the conference because I find, or I think that this content that I've been working on is really important for those of us working in these different parts of the data ecosystem, whether it be collecting data, analyzing data, and or visualizing or communicating data.
00:15:24
Speaker
And then, of course, the third thing, as I mentioned, is I like seeing people. I like seeing people that I haven't seen, especially after the pandemic. I haven't seen them in a long time. It's great to connect and see them and hear what's going on in different sectors, right? You know, as all of us do, we sort of get stuck in our little bubble. And when I say bubble, I don't mean a political bubble. I mean our work bubble, right? I'm working in the social sciences. The data move more slowly than in marketing or in the business sectors. And so,
00:15:51
Speaker
I do like to see and hear how people are using it in other areas. I attended a really interesting session on building games in Tableau. I talked to a bunch of people working in Tableau for education. And so there's a lot of use cases in Tableau. And I think there's obviously a conversation to have with folks about whether Tableau is the right solution for some of their needs and some of their tasks. But having these conversations is how we help determine what's the best way and the best technology
00:16:21
Speaker
to do these different data visualization and these data communication tasks. And I think you learn a lot by having these conversations in person. And as I said, we've lost since the pandemic, we've lost a lot of our data visualization conferences. Malofie Infographics Summit is done. The Visualize Conference is gone. That hasn't come back.
00:16:40
Speaker
info plus is every other year. So the tapestry conference that Tableau used to run isn't happening anymore. So there are a lot of conferences that are sort of gone by the wayside, which is part of what's great about the data visualization field is, you know, being part of that community and connect with folks. So.
00:16:57
Speaker
to that question of why I go, even though I'm not a kind of hardcore Tableau user, because I do use a lot of tools in my work, I think it's worth being in an environment to see how different people in different sectors in different areas of the world are using these tools in different use cases. And I think it's just a value to have and to connect with folks and to network with folks.
00:17:21
Speaker
So this is just a short podcast for the week.
Episode Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:17:23
Speaker
Just gonna slip it right in there between a different podcast on the regular cadence. I hope you found this interesting. I'm gonna put links to a bunch of the things that I talked about, including the Tableau Conference, where you can go and check out some of the videos from some of the talks presented. And of course, if you'd like to check out the Do No Harm Guide work that I've been doing, I'll put a link there as well, and would encourage you to check it out.
00:17:43
Speaker
Before you go, if you could just take a minute, rate or review the show on your favorite podcast provider, just click that little five-star button, we'd really appreciate it. Really helps me find other guests broaden the reach a little bit of the show. So that's all I've got. Until next time, this has been the policy of this podcast. Thanks so much for listening.