If you are a user of Tableau or you follow the company, you would already now that Tableau is known for bringing in some great innovation into the visual analytics space. It makes performing analysis a pleasure and simplifies the process so much that you would not realize that you are working anymore. ¬ With every new release, more and more features get added to the long list. That is more features every quarter at no additional cost.
This new release of Tableau 2019.4 was no different. It is packed with a tremendous amount of new features, some them, which we did not even anticipate. I am introducing to a few of the features that makes my life easy as a business user.
As an end user who makes decisions based on the dashboards I receive, below are some of items I liked the most.
1.Ask Data to get MORE answers
I have been using this feature to get answers without any help from my team (well, almost) and being self-sufficient is a great feeling. The newer version gives more flexibility to ask questions. For e.g., if I simple ask ‘MoM Profit growth’ it will give me the monthly change in profit in a trend line chart. How simple is that! In addition, the results I get from the questions can be directly shared over an email without having to save it. Now that is direct drilldown analysis and immediate action taken already.
2. Sharing the interactions
The comments option is a great way to tell your story to others and add your inputs so that the analysis makes more sense. However, there are times I wanted to ask questions regarding some of the data points, I do not want everyone to see it. Now, I can interact, drilldown to the points and simply send a link to specific users.
3. Explain data
Explain Data feature is a wonderful tool to get in-depth knowledge. I have uncovered some really valuable insights in the past, even with some small amount of data. The new version uses all the measures, even the ones that we have not used in any visualization, and the calculated fields. Imagine the number of possibilities the power of AI would bring in to get an explanation.
4. Tables
I agree that Visual Analytics is a great way to get the insights from the data. But this is at a summary level. There are times that we want to get to the exact record (a transaction or a line item) which has about 20 columns. With the new horizontal scrolling feature, Tableau allows adding up to 50 columns! That’s a limit I would not reach any time soon.
5. Browser enhancements
While I mostly only consumes the reports, sometimes I also explore the data, modify or develop my own reports, mostly for adhoc analyses. I have already started using the new features from the browser, which makes a free flow of the process. For e.g., not the tooltips can be edited online, I can create extracts on the browser, and even go to a location where a sheet is used. This really help.
6.Bonus: Mobile
A simple feature for added security. The mobile app can now be secured using the mobile’s security feature, like the fingerprint, faceID or even a pin.
These are only a small list of features which I think, will have a major impact on the way I work with data. There are more than 20 new features in all Tableau products. For the complete list of features on Tableau 2019.4, refer to Tableau webpage.
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