Tableau has introduced a wide range of capabilities to improve every stage of data analysis—from data preparation to dashboard consumption in its latest version 2022.1. Let’s take a closer look at what’s included for analysts and business users.
- Performance: Tableau Workbook Optimizer evaluates and exposes key design characteristics based on best practices collected in the comprehensive Designing Efficient Workbooks whitepaper. On the results page, one sees a prioritised list of concrete guidance explaining how your workbook design impacts efficiency and offering steps to take to improve your workbook’s performance. In addition to these areas to investigate or act on, one can also see items flagged that are already being well designed.
- Efficient Navigation: Tableau 2022.1 comes with a redesigned search experience for speed and simplicity. Using quality signals, such as recency and popularity, relevant content is brought to the top of the results page. In addition, the new relevance algorithm intelligently corrects for common issues like misspellings, spacing, and punctuation. When navigating through results, content is brought into one unified view—showing all content types—with each presented in the format they’re best viewed.
- Democratised analytics: Ask Data has been enhanced with a hybrid point-and-click guided experience for asking analytical questions. Ask Data Phrase Builder helps users tailor their questions to get to the right data insight, especially when working with data not well suited to natural language, or where the user doesn’t have a clear intent in mind. It’s easy to get started with the new guided experience by clicking the +Add Field button in the Ask Data interface.
- Data prep and modeling: Additional functionality for linked tasks has been designed to save you time. In the case of a failed run, backup flows can be set up to ensure that data is refreshed efficiently, without the need to over-schedule flow runs. Linked tasks can now also be run on already scheduled flows for easy integration into your existing data preparation processes. And finally, linked tasks support edits, so you can modify your automated flows without having to rebuild them from scratch.
- Web authoring – When authoring on the web in Tableau 2022.1, one can format trend lines and reference lines. These formatting options can be accessed via a line’s tooltip, via the right-click menu, or by left-clicking on a line while the formatting pane is open. From there, one can adjust the line’s style, size, and color, and the label’s font, size, and color. Context menus have also been added for trend lines, reference lines, highlighter cards, quick filters, and titles.
