A List of Tableau Features Since 2019

Identity Pools will enable you to branch out of the strict single identity store limitation we have in Tableau Server. An Identity Pool is the combination of a “Source of Users”, traditionally called the Identity Store and an authentication mechanism. With this feature, you will be able to add additional pools where you can have your source of users belong to a local identity store and have them authenticate with OpenID Connect for modern authentication. This added flexibility will be particularly helpful for organizations that have a set of external users that need access to Tableau that they are not able to invite to their corporate Active Directory.

Users can alter the title of their axis based on the value of a parameter or a single-value field with dynamic axis titles.

Collaborate on insights more effectively with the Tableau for Slack app. The latest enhancements make it even easier to put data at the center of every conversation and decision. Now, you can:Share Tableau content with context. Links now come with previews so your team can quickly recognize–and act on–relevant information.Easily search for and share Tableau content in direct messages and channels.Get to insights faster by conveniently accessing recents and favorites from the App homepage.*The Tableau for Slack enhancements will be available in the coming weeks.

With Data Mapping you can jump start your analytics even faster by reducing the time and effort required to set up an Accelerator’s ready-to-use dashboards. Now, when configuring an Accelerator, the Data Mapper allows users to pull outside data into the Accelerator and map fields from their data source into the fields the Accelerator expects. This will be made possible via the Data Mapping UI - a hybrid dialogue box that opens by default with any Data Mapping enabled Accelerator.

Data blending is a powerful tool for combining data sets. We've upgraded the iconography to match existing patterns and bring data blending into alignment with the overall UI design. Now linking fields are indicated with a link icon in gray, and potential linking fields appear as a slashed link. Rest assured, the functionality remains unchanged—click a slashed link to use the field for blending.

Tableau Cloud is Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant. Tableau Cloud meets the strict HIPAA standards for processing customers’ protected health information (PHI) and provides capabilities that can be used in the highly-regulated healthcare sector.

Tableau now supports a Linux connector for the TIBCO Data Virtualization platform.

Audit permissions change history with the Activity Log. This release expands auditing capabilities by tracking changes to group memberships, site roles, content moves, and more.

With the new ServiceNow JDBC connector you can access the full suite of default and custom ServiceNow objects. Additionally, this connector provides the ability to connect to private and air-gapped installations.

Tableau Mobile integrates with the Salesforce Security SDK to help you implement mobile security site settings and enforce policies. You can now block access on jailbroken devices or those with debuggers or malware.

Connect to your Exasol database securely using the Exasol JDBC connector on the Tableau Exchange.

The latest version of the Embedding API introduces pagination allowing developers building products powered by Tableau to fetch all underlying data. Check out our developer preview for a complete list of features.

This new connector provides a smooth and easy way to connect to Salesforce Marketing Cloud data directly from Tableau.

New accelerators:Supply IntelligenceInventoryShipment / LogisticsMajor upgrades:Production Scraps

Seamlessly switch sites or servers on mobile based on the destination of linked content. When clicking links to Tableau content from third party applications or sites, you will be redirected to the Tableau Mobile app and prompted to switch sites or servers if you're not initially signed in to the correct one.

Automate management for Custom Views at scale using an API to improve productivity. You can now leverage Custom Views in embedded scenarios to deliver relevant views that save your users’ filters, sorts, or selections.The Custom Views REST API introduces the following methods:getCustomizedViewImagegetCustomViewgetCustomViewsupdateCustomViewsdeleteCustomView

Conveniently access number and date formatting, including custom number formats, from a pill.Visually break up sections of your table to improve understanding by applying Table Shading for Headers, Panes, and Cells.Add context and enable further exploration by hyperlinking text objects using the Rich Text Editor.Understand what formatting options are available. Formatting options for Dividers and Borders now display dynamically based on the type of visualization and pills on the shelf.

Enhancements to the Workbook Optimizer allow workbook authors to ignore individual best practices that aren’t relevant to them and implement specific best practices with a single click. The Workbook Optimizer now includes even more best practices to help authors improve workbook performance.

Tableau Prep makes the process of building a flow to clean and shape you data incredibly visual. With a revamped flow edge graph, we are reducing visual distractions that arise when the flow graph becomes larger and more complicated. These changes will provide you with a more legible, flexible, and playful experience when creating flows.

With the new LogShark plugin you can easily collect Tableau Prep log files and automatically generate Tableau Dashboards to analyze interactive performance, flow execution performance, and errors.

New external Assets are now automatically added to a new project titled, “External Assets Default Project.” With this change, site administrators can assign project leaders and set default permissions to correctly govern any new External Assets added to Tableau. This change makes it even easier to organize and govern databases, tables, and files in Tableau.

Virtual Connections now support connections to:Microsoft OneDriveApache DrillApache Spark SQLCloudera Hadoop HiveDatoramaDremio ConnectorIBM DB2KyvosQubole Presto

Tableau Prep will now allow users to drag a new input step over an existing one to automatically replace it while retaining the connection with the rest of your Flow steps, improving the authoring experience.

Within Virtual Connections you can now connect to an additional database to pull in an entitlement table. This feature simplifies the process of creating policy statements and removes the requirement to duplicate entitlement tables across databases.

Using the new Credential Rotation APIs, you can programmatically change credentials for Virtual Connections and automate operations. There are three new API endpoints to help you:Get a list of available Virtual Connection names and IDsGet a list of database connections found in a Virtual Connection and information about themUpdate the server address, port, username, or password for the specified database connection in a Virtual Connection

Within the editor for a Virtual Connection you can now manually refresh the database connection to get the latest data. This means if changes occur in the database, you can refresh immediately, without closing the Virtual Connection and coming back or waiting for the cache to expire.

See and understand data in your preferred language. Tableau has expanded language options to include Thai and Swedish.

Total views and favorites are displayed as Metrics in the new Usage tab. With these insights, analysts can better understand what workbooks are popular so they can build content that resonates with their audience. Viewers can leverage Usage Metrics to validate that the content is widely used and trustworthy.

Format string fields using the ‘PROPER( )’ function instead of complex workaround calculations. This new function converts strings to proper case. The first letter of a text string and any letters following non-letter characters are capitalized, while the rest are converted to lowercase.

Improve insight comprehension and help end-users better connect to and understand visualizations using Image Role. Image Role is a new field semantic that offers a scalable and automated way to bring image assets into Tableau. Tableau can now dynamically map images to links in your data and encode them as exportable row or column headers. This new capability makes it possible to manage image assets externally to prevent workbook sizes from becoming too large to maintain and share.

Selectively replace data sources on a worksheet-level without complicated workarounds. Previously, replacing data sources would apply to all worksheets in the workbook using the datasource. Now, you have greater control and can select to apply data source changes to only the current worksheet.

Tableau External Actions delivers a native integration with Salesforce Flow to help automate business processes, saving you time and money. By connecting your dashboards to Salesforce, you can make decisions in context and run flows without leaving Tableau. Now, you can escalate a case, send a customer invoice, and more with the click of a button.

The following Connector is available now on the Tableau Exchange:Firebolt

When working with really large tables in Tableau Prep, instead of manually dragging and dropping each column in the profile pane, users can now drag-and-drop to sort data columns in the field list view. Once the user has specified their column order, the order is maintained across the entire flow and the final output after the flow is run.Previously released in other Tableau products in Tableau 2022.2, this capability is now available in Tableau Server 2022.3.

Navigate to relevant content faster and more intelligently in Tableau. The reimagined Quick Search includes a new suggested content algorithm, a streamlined design, and past searches a click away to save time and speed up your time to insight.Previously released in other Tableau products in Tableau 2022.2, this capability is now available in Tableau Server 2022.3.

Create metrics to track key data points without having to access your dashboards and edit them at any time. You can now come back and edit existing metrics to change the historical comparison period, the date range used by the metric, and the status indicators. Additionally, you can dynamically explore different date windows while analyzing the metric without editing the configuration.Previously released in other Tableau products in Tableau 2022.2, this capability is now available in Tableau Server 2022.3.

See and understand data in your local language. We've expanded our language options to include French (Canada), making Tableau feel more familiar for French (Canada) speakers.Previously released in other Tableau products in Tableau 2022.2, this capability is now available in Tableau Server 2022.3.

You can now automatically suspend acceleration for views that are consuming unnecessary resources. Set a threshold for the number of times an acceleration task can fail per day, week, or month before the acceleration is automatically suspended.Previously released in other Tableau products in Tableau 2022.2, this capability is now available in Tableau Server 2022.3.

We continue to extend the availability of Ask Data! Adding Ask Data to a Dashboard is now smoother than ever, supported end-to-end in Tableau Desktop. Also, we are increasing flexibility to manage Ask Data inside dashboards. Analysts can decide to show or hide the Ask Data Configuration toolbar, so business users can easily add visualizations to Pins, publish them as workbooks, or even share them with others.Previously released in other Tableau products in Tableau 2022.2, this capability is now available in Tableau Server 2022.3.

We've released a number of new Accelerators built by Tableau + Salesforce and partners. Here are some of the highlights!New accelerators:Salesforce CDP Email Marketing CampaignsPower Grid ConnectionsEmergency CallsMajor upgrades:DonationsRecurring RevenuesSales (expert)Sales Pipeline

With the new connector for Sharepoint Lists in Tableau Cloud and the Tableau Exchange, users can now access data in SharePoint Lists, directly from Tableau. This connector also supports Azure AD authentication.

There is now a new developer experience for creating connectors to web application data via APIs. Web Data Connector 3.0 provides a toolkit with everything you need to develop a connector in a single package. Additionally, web data connectors are now .taco files so they no longer need to be web hosted and can be easily integrated across the entire Tableau platform.

You can now share content with other Tableau users in Tableau Mobile to ensure you’re working off the same information. Recipients will receive a notification and have shared content appear in the “Shared with Me” channel on their home screen.

Virtual Connections can now connect to files stored in Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage Gen 2.

Tableau Server customers can choose to force extract encryption at the site or server level, similar to extracts not contained within a Virtual Connection.

Data quality warnings can now be applied at the column level. Data quality warnings allow you to mark columns that are deprecated or stale, and those that may be displaying incorrect values. When a data quality warning is configured, you can enable a high-visibility warning across downstream assets to inform users of potential issues with the underlying data.

Users can now configure subscriptions, alerts, metrics, and thumbnail generation for assets that leverage data sources created from Virtual Connections.

After using Tableau Prep to clean, shape, and combine data, you can now write your flow output to CRM Analytics. This new capability, available in both Tableau Prep Builder and Tableau Prep on the web, lets you combine the ease of cleaning and shaping data in Tableau Prep with CRM Analytics to enable your Salesforce CRM users with actionable insights and AI-driven analytics right in their workflow.

External Assets can now be moved into projects. This change democratizes metadata curation by utilizing existing project permissions to allow more users to manage descriptions and data quality warnings. This removes site admins as a potential bottleneck and gives metadata ownership to users who know the data best. Additionally, this makes External Assets more discoverable for content creators.

To help you troubleshoot flow run failures with Tableau Prep Conductor, we’ve added over 400 error codes and improved error messaging to provide clarity on root causes and troubleshooting steps.

The Tableau search experience continues to improve! Search now incorporates signals about your content preferences and personal viewing habits. These signals include the content that you have viewed in the past*, content that you have favorited, and Views that are recommended to you. Trust that the content relevant to you is at the top of your search results with the all new personalized search.*in 2022.3, this is only supported for views, workbooks, metrics and flows

Configuring an SMTP server connection with the Resource Monitoring Tool (RMT) is now easier with additional flexibility to disable, prefer, or require encryption. These options align more closely with those of Tableau Server, are easy to understand, and provide support for different SMTP configurations.

Advanced Management for Tableau Server customers leveraging the Resource Monitoring Tool can now choose to run the PostgreSQL and RabbitMQ services that support the Resource Monitoring Tool Server externally in AWS utilizing PostgreSQL via AWS RDS and RabbitMQ via AWS AMQ. Running these two services in an external configuration frees up local resources needed for data processing and improves the Resource Monitoring Tool’s ability to scale for your environment.

Get more flexibility when using a dimension as a measure within the same or different worksheet now with a quicker gesture. Simply drag a dimension over the dimension-measure separator using the modifier key (Windows: Ctrl, OSX: Cmd), and the dimension will be copied as a measure.

Web authors now can format the borders and dividers of totals and subtotals cells within a table to select their preferred style. To improve the user experience, a dynamic display shows users the curated formatting settings that only apply to the visualization type and selected cells–giving a clear path of which formatting options you can change.

Now you can quickly share insights from Explain Data through Slack and email. Recipients are notified on Slack with an image and description of the explanation and can click a link to open the explanation in Tableau.

Embedding API v3.3 delivers the full power of embedding analytics with support for custom views, viz resizing, story points, and much more. Check out our developer preview for a complete list of features.

You can now add automated plain-language summaries to dashboards using Data Stories on any data source. When setting up Data Stories, you will be notified that your data is sent to a cloud-hosted service. If you’d instead like to restrict use of Data Stories, administrators can disable this feature for all users through site settings.

You can now change the field data type through the data pane while authoring on the web. This ensures your data is analyzed correctly. The experience is the same as it is with Tableau Desktop: click the icon to the left of the field name and choose a new data type from the drop-down list.

We’ve streamlined the experience for organizing your data into hierarchies and folders. When you create a hierarchy or folder, the data pane automatically scrolls to the newly created hierarchy or folder position and selects it for you, so you can continue interacting with it without having to stop.

Collections allow members across your organization to gather and organize content from across your site on Tableau Cloud or Tableau Server. Admins can now enable or disable Collections for an entire site with a single click. Pre-existing Collections will be restored if you re-enable Collections.

Ensure members in your organization are aware of and can access relevant content more quickly. Tableau checks if the people you shared content with have the proper permissions to view it. If you share with someone who does not have access, you will now be prompted to manage permissions and grant access immediately after sharing.

Ask Data phrase recommendations make it even easier for business users to ask questions of their data using natural language. Powered by machine learning models, Ask Data intelligently recommends next steps to uncover insights in your data by suggesting new measures to add to your question or dimensions to group by or filter on. Selected recommendations automatically update the query sent to Ask Data and the visualized answer that is returned.

The Activity Log goes above and beyond existing event data by exposing more events within your Tableau environment. These events will be structured and documented. For Advanced Management for Tableau Server customers, this comes to life through a new log file in your Tableau Server logs folder. The Activity Log will make permissions auditing possible which is essential for implementing a robust book of controls on your Tableau environment.

Advanced Management for Tableau Server customers can now scale Backgrounders, and their supporting processes, in Docker containers via Kubernetes on a set schedule. In the past, Tableau Server admins faced a predicament: pay to size the deployment for peak load times or save money but face longer delays before Backgrounder processes finish. Now, you can add additional Backgrounder resources when needed and spin them down after peak times, giving you control over the cost vs. performance tradeoff.

With dynamic zone visibility, you can tailor experiences for your end-users so they only see the dashboard elements relevant to them. Create sophisticated and interactive dashboards that dynamically reveal dashboard elements. In the layout pane, you configure when dashboard elements are shown or hidden based on the values of parameters and fields.

Table Extensions add new depth to seeing and understanding data by bringing deep analytics and data shaping with code and APIs to the core of Tableau. Dynamically bring entire data tables from analytics tools like Python, R, Einstein Discovery, and more into Tableau's data model. Live query tables of data using Tableau's Data Model and pass it to analytics extensions for analysis, re-shaping, or enrichment, and return results tables to Tableau just like any other data source. With Table Extensions, you are able to inject advanced analytics and predictions at different levels of detail, bring more data for better business decisions, and get real-time results because values are re-computed dynamically.

Data Guide is a new pane that provides helpful information about a dashboard and the data behind it. With Data Guide, you can understand if the data can answer your questions, build trust that the data is accurate, and establish confidence in your understanding of the viz. This feature makes it even easier to find data related to the selected viz, dashboard, marks, and important information like outliers and trends in your data. Data Guide also introduces Explain the which Viz scans your dashboards for outlier measures and potential key drivers behind them. This pane is available on Tableau Server, Tableau Cloud and Tableau Desktop.

Advanced Management provides Tableau Cloud customers with additional site capacity including:• 1 TB of Storage• Up to 25 Concurrent Extracts• 25 GB Max File Size

Configure automatic user and group management through Azure AD. Synchronize Tableau Cloud and Azure AD to quickly provision and de-provision users and groups at scale. If users are members of multiple groups with varying role assignment in Azure, they will receive the most permissive site role in Tableau Cloud. We also now offer a more secure authentication method using bearer tokens.

Using the REST API, you can set where you want Tableau to be embedded at the site level. Site admin can allow embedding for all domains or specific domains or block embedding content from that site all together.

With Advanced Management, Admin Insights in Tableau Cloud will now retain data for up to 365 days. With longer data retention it is easier to track adoption, site activity, and content usage and performance over time through the Admin Insights Starter workbook, or custom admin views.

The Activity Log goes above and beyond existing event data by exposing more events within your Tableau environment. These events will be structured and documented. For Advanced Management for Tableau Cloud customers, this comes to life through a JSON file that is sent to an S3 bucket. The Activity Log will make permissions auditing possible which is essential for implementing a robust book of controls on your Tableau environment.

Tableau Cloud Advanced Management customers can now manage their own encryption key, which will encrypt all data extracts on their site. Customer-Managed Encryption Keys (CMEK) leverage Salesforce Shield Key Broker and allow customers to create, rotate, audit, and delete their key from the Tableau Cloud UI. The Master Encryption Key is stored in Salesforce's KMS Service and the key is unique to your site. Leveraging CMEK on top of built in encryption storage provides a defense-in-depth strategy to protect your data and meet tough compliance standards.

The Search API provides a new powerful way for developers and partners to build functionality that searches across their Tableau content. The Search API supports fuzzy matching on keywords, filters, multiple sort options, and pagenation. By default, results are sorted by relevance, allowing external developers and partners to take advantage of our internal ranking alogrithms.

The Content Migration Tool is here with Advanced Management for Tableau Cloud. The Content Migration Tool automates tasks such as content promotion and archiving, supporting both traditional and modern workflows or anywhere in between. With a codeless, streamlined, and repeatable migration plan, you can copy or migrate content between projects on Tableau Cloud. The Content Migration Tool User Interface walks you through the steps necessary to build a migration plan that you can use a single time or schedule for repeated migrations.

Customers can have their external client applications establish authenticated user sessions with specific OAuth access scopes through JSON Web Token (JWT) verified by Connected Apps. With a valid user session, the client application can access to REST APIs on behalf of the user as long as the required scopes of the called endpoints are included in the access token. 70+ APIs are enabled in this release.

Managing lenses across sites is now a breeze. Export curated and tested lenses from one site and import them to one or hundreds of sites at scale, even across separate servers. Transformations also let you surgically change details on import, like updating names or connected data sources. Get all the information in our REST API Help.

With the Metrics REST API endpoint, you can now fetch Metrics data within your own applications and custom developments. This gives you the flexibility to format and display your Metrics data within your own environments, or even pull Metrics data into a database to trigger actions.

Admins can enable Explain Data by default for all workbooks on a Tableau Cloud site.

Tabcmd 2.0 is an open-source Python-based command-line utility that uses the Tableau Server Client (TSC) to support the functionality of the existing tabcmd. This new version adds support for personal access tokens for authentication, which provides a unified developer experience across the Tableau Developer Platform by calling the Tableau REST API.

We've strengthened security with Tableau Bridge OAuth support. You can now use OAuth as a secured authentication process allowing you to authenticate without using credentials to enhance your data security.

Capture Tableau dashboards using your browsers’ printing capabilities. When printing, choose landscape or portrait and scale according to your needs. Native printing works especially well in embedded scenarios and renders Dashboard Extensions.

You can now automatically suspend acceleration for views that are consuming unnecessary resources. Set a threshold for the number of times an acceleration task can fail per day, week, or month before the acceleration is automatically suspended.

Gain visibility into events and runtime information for background jobs initiated by scheduled tasks on the site.

Policy authors can test the impact of policies within Virtual Connections by quickly identifying data domains that are visible or hidden after applying a policy to a column.

Revision history is now supported by Virtual Connections. This feature, available in Tableau Cloud, enables automatically storing old revisions across content types, viewing those revisions, and restoring them.

Enables Tableau Cloud customers to use external IdPs to build trust relationship between their applications and Tableau. This allows end-users to seamlessly access embedded analytics without in-frame authentication and allows the application to programmatically access the Tableau REST API.

Views, workbooks, and Metrics in Start Pages and favorited Collections are locally cached, providing access to your most important data even when you're offline. Like other favorited content, views will be stored as interactive previews, allowing you to scroll, pan, zoom, see data tooltips, and highlight marks. Once online, you can seamlessly transition to the latest version on Tableau Mobile.

Tableau Mobile has added another layer of encryption for files stored by the app, making it even more secure. Our app double-encrypts files with software-encryption and OS-provided encryption.

To continue helping you optimize the consumption experience of your dashboards, Workbook Optimizer has new best practices available that automatically provide more suggestions to make your workbook run fast and smooth in Tableau Cloud and Tableau Desktop.

You can now access the context menu for caption boxes to format their height while authoring on the web.

Select a subset of files from a directory based on a new set of attributes within Tableau Prep. These attributes include file name, creation time, last modified time, last access time and size.

Web authors can format headers, panes, and cells’ table borders to select their preferred style, width, and color. Additionally, they can change the style, width, and color of dividers and select the appropriate divider level.

We continue to improve the formatting experience for reference and trend lines in Web authoring! You can now format the color and opacity of reference bands. We’ve also introduced custom number and date formatting for reference line labels, and you can customize your labels’ color and shading.

We continue to extend the availability of Ask Data! Adding Ask Data to a Dashboard is now smoother than ever, supported end-to-end in Tableau Desktop. Also, we are increasing flexibility to manage Ask Data inside dashboards. Analysts can decide to show or hide the Ask Data Configuration toolbar, so business users can easily add visualizations to Pins, publish them as workbooks, or even share them with others.

Tableau Catalog gives you full visibility into your data assets. Now, you can see and monitor our newest content type: Ask Data Lenses. Discover and access downstream lenses faster, understand data lineage to weigh in the implications of any data definition changes, leverage the metadata API for deep insights that allow you to make informed decisions, and enable metadata visibility across your Tableau ecosystem.