A List of Tableau Features Since 2019

Analyzing spatial data just got easier—you can now union two or more tables that contain spatial field types in Tableau. With the spatial file union, combining unique geographies within the same administrative level, or working with geographic events from different periods of time, are both made simple. For example, you can now easily union and explore multiple tables with wildfire boundaries from 2017, 2018, and 2019, without having to leave Tableau.

For the marks selection event, when a user clicks on a column or row header, the marks in that column or row are selected, and will now return correctly when querying the selected marks in the API.

You can now tag stale content directly from the stale content admin view for easy follow up with content owners.

Use the IN operator in calculations to test whether a specified value matches any value in a list of comma-separated values, a set, or combined fields like City/State combinations. The IN operator supports string, numeric, date, and boolean data types.

Use filters in the data pane to refine your search and find the right field you need for analysis. Search and filter based on field name, type, or comments.

Connect to and analyze your Presto data from the web authoring experience of Tableau Server or Tableau Online.

See every asset in your environment via External Assets, including files and tables that are embedded in workbooks. This provides a holistic view of what data users are leveraging outside of published data or content.

Make it even easier to find the right data by tagging external assets, including databases, tables, and columns.

Keep users informed of data quality warnings while they're performing their analysis in Tableau Desktop. With a quick indicator on the data source, users get the information they need about the state of the data.

Create relationships between tables in your data source with more flexibility. You can now relate tables based on custom calculated fields, like concatenated fields or date truncation, and inequality operators. Additionally, we've improved the drag-and-drop experience in the data model.

You can now open links to your dashboards and metrics in Tableau Mobile, whether you use Tableau Server or Tableau Online. Get to your content quickly for further exploration while using your mobile device.

When you generate a .png or .pdf of a dashboard that you are viewing in Tableau Desktop, it will now render the Extension zone's image.

Take advantage of using Google BigQuery's NUMERIC data type without having to use CustomSQL, instead convert your NUMERIC type to DOUBLE.

Tableau Mobile for Workspace ONE is an update to the existing app that provides a quick and secure way to view, analyze and leverage the data in your organization. The new app, compatible with iOS13, includes a newer design that is faster and more intuitive, an improved search and browsing experience consistent with Tableau Server and Tableau Online, as well as enhanced offline capabilities that are quick to load and offer richness and interactivity for visualizations.

Tableau Mobile for Intune is a new app that provides a quick and secure way to view, analyze and leverage the data that’s in your organization on Microsoft’s Intune Enterprise management platform. The app, compatible with iOS13, includes a design that is fast and intuitive, an improved search and browsing experience that is consistent with Tableau Server and Tableau Online as well as enhanced offline capabilities that are quick to load and offer richness and interactivity for visualizations.

You can now connect to and sign-in with the Tableau Mobile app when Tableau Server is configured with OpenID authentication. You can leverage the default browser on your device (Safari on iOS, Chrome on Android) when authenticating and remain logged-in to the browser. The secure exchange between the browser and the mobile app is based on the key components of the OpenID connect standard called Proof Key for Code Exchange (PKCE).

Tableau Mobile for BlackBerry is an update to the existing mobile app. The new app (compatible with iOS13) includes a newer and more intuitive design, an improved search and browsing experience that is consistent with Tableau Server and Tableau Online, as well as enhanced offline capabilities so users can enjoy the richness and interactivity of visualizations, from anywhere.

You can now connect to and sign in with the Tableau Mobile app when Tableau Server is configured with Certification-based auth or Mutual SSL. You can leverage the default browser on your device (Safari on iOS, Chrome on Android) when authenticating and remain logged-in to the browser.

Metrics are a simple way to get a curated and consistent view of your data. Create a metric from nearly any Tableau dashboard with a single click and view your metrics across multiple dashboards in one spot - either on the web or the Tableau Mobile app.

Whether using Tableau Prep Builder or Conductor, incrementally add fresh data to the flow. This saves time and resources, preventing the need to rerun the entire data set.

You can now programmatically export a workbook as a Powerpoint file, making it easier to operationalize traditional reporting workflows. You can also lock nested projects programmatically.

Connect to Salesforce directly within Tableau Prep Builder and start getting to analysis faster.

We've added two new views to give you better insight into the health of your Tableau Server deployment. The new backgrounder view gives you additional insight into backgrounder load, how long jobs run for, and events like failures, cancellations, and completions. Our new stale content view helps you identify unused content based on customizable parameters that you can establish for your Tableau Server.

You can now enable webhooks at the site level, giving you more fine-grain control across your deployment.

Dashboard authors now control which columns are modeled in Explain Data. With the ability to select which columns are included and excluded from explanations, authors can better curate their analytical experience. Explain Data will also now surface multiple extreme values, allowing you to explore more than one outlier at a time.

You can now manually sort your favorited content on Tableau Server and Tableau Online. From the grid view, simply drag and drop your Favorites in the order you want to see them, bringing your most important content front and center.

Now many common TSM commands can be implemented without having to restart Tableau Server. Hot config commands are clearly identified in the command line when you are making changes.

Server administrators can now configure multiple Analytics Extension (formerly External Service) connections in Tableau Server. Administrators can set one per site through the Settings UI and turn connections on or off at the Site level. Now teams using different R, Python, and other external data science environments can share their work with consumers across the same Server. Settings are easier than ever to configure with UI controls or via the Server REST API.

Sharing your work and exploring insights from others just got easier. You can now open a Tableau workbook, or upload it straight to the web without having to use Tableau Desktop. Simply select the workbook (.twb or .twbx) you want to upload and publish directly to your site on Tableau Server or Online. Only users with the appropriate publishing permissions will have the ability to upload content.

You can now create custom suggestions and consistent semantic context with data roles. With customized suggestions, data source owners can provide relevant prompts that give users insight to the data and the types of questions they can ask. Data roles make it easy to add important context to field definitions and synonyms, and apply that information across data sources. Other improvements include support for scripted data sources and improved enterprise controls.

You can now connect Tableau directly to your location data in Esri by simply entering an ArcGIS Server URL or GeoService API URL. Automated extract refreshes ensure that visualizations are always up to date, and enable you to spend less time sourcing data and more time in analysis.

We’re expanding Tableau’s spatial database connections to make solving location-based questions easier than ever. You can now connect to tables in Oracle that contain spatial data, and instantly visualize that data in Tableau.

The set control allows users to dynamically change the members of a set using a familiar, quick filter-like interface. End users can change set membership with both a single and multi-select dropdown, and the set control automatically refreshes its domain so that the data stays fresh.

From the External Assets page, filter by connections type, certifications, or Data Quality Warnings. Get a better understanding of all the assets on your server or site.

Data quality warnings make it possible to let users know when a data asset is flagged, whether because the data is under maintenance, it's stale, or some other reason. With high visibility data quality warnings, not only let users know about the issue but make sure they don't miss it.

The lineage tool is powerful to understanding the relationships between all of the different data assets on your deployment. Now, you can see not only down to the sheet level, but also see dashboards.

When creating a new workbook, filter the data assets by those with or without the presence of a data quality warning. Be informed about the status of the data you're connecting to.

We have improved our OData Connector which now supports S/4HANA. Additionally, users can now connect to an OData service URL to list all the feeds inside their service and can join those feeds together just as they would any other tables in a Tableau datasource.

Want to see how a viz on Tableau Public was made? You can now explore a viz directly in a browser. Explore, make your own version, and save as a copy to your profile with automatic attribution to the original author.

Set actions just got even more powerful with two new selection modes. You can now incrementally add and remove values from a set by interacting with marks in the view, even after a selection is cleared.

While building your Prep Builder flows, you may occasionally want to change the connection attributes or the credentials for your input steps. With this release, we are making it easier to quickly map your Input steps to their originating connections in the Connections pane. Simply select one or more of your input steps, and all the connections associated with those inputs will be highlighted in the Connections pane.

See a viz in your activity feed you like? You can now add vizzes to your favorites directly from your Tableau Public activity feed.

Combining data just got easier and more powerful. By visually creating logical relationships between tables, Tableau will only query the data relevant to your analysis at the right level of detail. Analyze complex data faster and with more confidence.

View recommendations are now on Tableau Mobile. Get personalized suggestions that instantly connect you to relevant vizzes on the go. Powered by machine learning, these recommendations leverage users' preferences and surface vizzes that others with similar viewing habits found interesting, and that are popular on your site. With the home tab, you can find recommendations in a dedicated channel on your Tableau Mobile App.

“Add Credentials” in Prep Builder before publishing your flow to Prep Conductor. This will allow you to create new credentials in Tableau Server, that you can choose to use with the flow you are publishing.

Tableau Mobile for BlackBerry is an update to the existing mobile app. The new app (compatible with iOS13) includes a newer and more intuitive design, an improved search and browsing experience that is consistent with Tableau Server and Tableau Online, as well as enhanced offline capabilities so users can enjoy the richness and interactivity of visualizations, from anywhere.

If you are using Tableau Prep Conductor in Tableau Server or Tableau Online to operationalize your flows, you need to be able to seamlessly navigate between the desktop and the server experience. With compatibility mode, only features that are fully compatible with your server version will be active. If a feature is incompatible, it will be greyed out and disabled.

Add cleaning operations in bulk without waiting to see the data update in the profile panes. Hit the pause button, add your operations, and then click resume to see the collective results of all the new steps you added.

Login-based license management allows Creators to activate Tableau Desktop or Tableau Prep by simply logging in to these products with their Tableau Server credentials—no product key needed. Admins can assign, monitor, and reclaim Tableau Desktop or Tableau Prep access directly from Tableau Server instead of distributing license keys to end users. This licensing option is available to role-based customers. Contact your account team to learn more.

You can now use the TableauServerUser, TableauServerUserFull, TableauApp, TableauVersion, and WorkbookName as parameters in your Initial SQL for Tableau Prep.

Simplify the ability to prepare and analyze your data at multiple levels of granularity with Level of Detail calculations in Tableau Prep Builder. No more multi-step flows to get the desired aggregation. Instead, use Tableau Prep's visual and easy to use calculations.

To improve secured connections for R, Python, and other Analytics Extensions (formerly External Services), Tableau Desktop and Server now support the ability to use SSL certificates stores in the operating system key store instead of requiring a cert to be provided directly.

Connect to your Cloudera Impala data natively on Tableau Desktop or from the web authoring experience on Tableau Server or Tableau Online.

Tableau’s Python Integration Server, TabPy, is being moved to a Tableau supported 1.0 version. This update includes a simplified install, user authentication, secured connections (SSL), and pre-built statistical models.

The Analytics Extensions API allows developers to write their own dynamic extensions of Tableau’s calculation language to integrate new programming languages, machine learning models, and advanced statistical functions. This initial release of the API supports the Evaluate API method.

You can now control the permission settings separately for content in a project and any nested projects it contains. Improve navigation and organization of your site’s content and allow site admins to delegate more effectively to non-admins.

Bring more interactivity and richness to your dashboards by adding visualizations to your tooltips, directly in the browser.

With a major update to the permissions dialog, you'll be able to set up permissions for users and groups faster and easier than ever before. Updates include new action-oriented permission templates, the ability to search both Users and Groups simultaneously without preselecting your choice, and a new copy-paste function for permission rules. All of these updates are wrapped in a more intuitive user experience with stylistic refinements.

We’ve added Snowflake Role support. It is now possible to override the default role in the Snowflake dialog, and the role defined in the connection can be applied in OAuth scenarios.

Get to the right data, faster. See Google BigQuery, Google Sheets and Cloudfile connections in the Tableau Catalog Connect to experience when the Data Management Add-on is enabled on your deployment.

With the Data Management Add-on, users can now filter to a particular connection type or data sources with certifications or data quality warnings in the Connect to data experience. Get to the right data, faster.

As part of Advanced Management for Tableau Server, you can now leverage network storage devices for backup snapshots which significantly reduces the time required to perform a back up. You can also use this new capability to streamline your deployment topology by centralizing your file store, eliminating the need to run file stores on multiple nodes in a Tableau Server Cluster.

Connect to the right data more quickly by creating a workbook directly from the External Assets page.

We’ve updated our Salesforce connector to provide faster performance, greater flexibility, and even more data to play with. First, we changed the way we connect to Salesforce data; the connector now dynamically switches APIs depending on how large your dataset is, greatly increasing performance. Additionally, the Salesforce connector also now supports using the SOQL language in the same way that Custom SQL can be used today, adding flexibility to your analysis. Finally, you will now be able to connect to additional data objects like Salesforce Activity History and Campaign Influence, giving you even more data to see and understand in Tableau.

Explain Data continues to get better and better with performance improvements for wide datasets, and refined models to help you go deeper into your data.

Viz animations help you see and understand your changing data. It’s easy to track the logical steps behind data’s evolution and tell powerful data stories. Sorting, filtering, adding fields, and other actions will now smoothly animate your visualizations. Choose whether to turn viz animations on or off, and decide how you’d best like to apply animations to your new workbooks.

We've improved the way Server and site admins limit the number of license types on their sites. This update will also allow Server admins to delegate license allocation to site admins.

A new dashboard object allows you to easily export a dashboard in the format you determine. Quickly choose the export format, image type, and button styles to make any dashboard easily exportable for end users.

Control more aspects of your map in the browser. Change background map styles, repeat backgrounds, map layers, and demographic data layers. In addition, the style picker dropdown makes it easier to find and distinguish between map styles.

For workbooks using pages, press play directly in the browser to see how a given measure affects the rest of your data. Combine with Viz Animations for smooth, coherent transitions showing changes between states or over time.

Buffer calculations allow you to visualize the distance around point locations. Give Tableau three parameters—location, distance, and a unit of measure—and a buffer, or boundary is instantly created. Answering complex spatial questions becomes easier than ever before—visualize what properties are within 200 meters of a proposed transit site, or how many competitors’ stores are within 1 mile of their store, and more.

Personal Access Tokens (PAT) provide individual users the ability to create long-lived authentication tokens for running automation and tools against Tableau REST APIs without requiring hard-coded account credentials in plain text or an interactive login experience.

You can now customize the Discover Pane that appears on the start page in Tableau Desktop to show your own custom content instead of the content Tableau shows by default. Provide links and information specific to your organization to make it easier for your users to get started using Tableau quickly.

Say goodbye to republishing workbooks with parameters every time the underlying data changes. Set your parameter once, and Tableau will automatically update the parameter’s list of values every time someone opens the workbook.

With extensions, you can create more customized visualizations. We are now supporting the Image Map Filter, Single Checkbox Parameters, and Filter Bookmarks extensions on Tableau Public. These extensions are available for download in our Tableau Exchange.

Stay on top of the quality of your data that fuels your dashboards, no matter where you are. You can see data quality warnings right from Tableau Mobile (Data Management Add-on required).

Always know the state of your flow. With a progress indicator you'll know what's happening with the flow and how much of the data the flow has left to process.

Use biometrics or device passcode with long-lived OAuth tokens for an additional layer of security. Sign in once, and then rely on biometrics or device passcode to unlock the app.

Start prepping your cloud-based files from Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive in Tableau Prep Builder, then publish them up to Tableau Prep Conductor.

When sharing a dashboard or view that been modified (through selections, filters, zooming, panning), sharing will automatically generate a link that includes these interactions. Simply enter in the names of any named users on the site to send them an email with the dashboard or view image and an optional note.

We've made extensions more flexible. Now developers can now create sandboxed extensions, which disables network calls - streamlining the development process from a security standpoint.

You can now create automated workflows, triggered by events as they happen, with webhooks support for Tableau Online and Tableau Server. With webhooks support, the possibilities are endless - you could build workflows that alert users of new content through Slack, or automatically create case tickets within ServiceNow, if an extract fails. Join the Tableau Developer program to learn more.

With Tableau 2019.4 Explain Data now supports unvisualized measures and calculated fields, allowing you to inspect your data in more situations.

Edit tooltips in the browser. Stay in the data flow, create and update tooltips while web authoring.

With our new Level AA accessibility compliance, we're improving the ability to interact with a viz in view mode on Tableau Online and Tableau Server using common accessibility tools.

Skip the Desktop, build extracts right in the browser to save time and give your laptop a break.

With the User Visibility site control, you can limit user-to-user visibility, allowing you to share a single site's content with multiple clients, suppliers, and partners.

We’re making it easier for you to enable more curated experiences for Ask Data. Admins now have the flexibility to enable or disable Ask Data as the default site setting, helping ensure users are only using Ask Data on a subset of curated data sources. Quickly share Ask Data insights with your team by sending a link, without having to save content to the server. And finally, calculating year-over-year metrics is as simple as typing “YoY profit growth”, helping you quickly answer critical questions of your data.

Gain deeper insights from your Sales Navigator Application Platform (SNAP) data. Connect to and analyze your SNAP data in Tableau, enabling your Sales Operations users to merge, analyze, and visualize social selling data alongside their other sales performance reports.

Ensure your team finds important resources and information by customizing the welcome banner on the Home screen.

Create tables with up to 50 columns with the ability to scroll horizontally. For flat tables, sort entire columns by dimensions and discrete measures across multiple panes.

Update map settings in the browser. Change map backgrounds, styles, layers, and other settings in the browser without having to jump into Desktop.

View Recommendations are personalized suggestions that instantly connect you to relevant data and content on your site. Powered by machine learning, these recommendations match preferences between users, surfacing content that others like you have found interesting or useful, including what's most popular and recent.

For customers using Presto, you can now take full advantage of the innovation of Qubole as a native connector. Available for Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server.

For customers using Kyvos, you can now natively connect and start analyzing your data. Available for Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server.

Now when you connect to SAP HANA, leveled hierarchies utilized in calculation views will automatically be available in Tableau.