Get on board with Tableau 10.5

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One of the world’s most powerful BI Visual Analytics tool has been updated once again, and this time it isn’t holding back with powerful new features across all their platforms, it once again will remind you why you chose Tableau in the first place.

Let’s start off by talking a bit about Tableau’s biggest feature this release: Hyper. It’s the new data engine which is designed for fast data processing and analytical querying on large and even complex data sets, coming with its own extract extension too, this new data engine is a beast. It’s so powerful that you will see a decrease in both extraction time and an increase in your query performances. It’s also so simple to use – upgrading to Tableau 10.5 will give you access to hyper engine, no data migration required at all, just save as the new file type and you’ll be cruising through your data at faster speeds than you were before.

Have you ever had a colleague who just doesn’t update no matter how cool the new features are? Well because of that colleague (yes, I’m looking at you Dave!) keeping 2 versions of Tableau is a personal nuisance of mine as I commonly boot into the older version when searching for just Tableau. However with the advent of Tableau 10.5, now having export compatibility support up to 10.2, I can work comfortably in 10.5 and just export my workbook to a different version, no hassle, no fuss.

A big part of Tableau is all about the visual, I have no idea how some people still get by just looking at numbers with no shape or form. Tableau has allowed me to dig even deeper into my data by implementing Viz in Tooltip. By just hovering over my data points, I can get data on demand without changing views, it’s just increased the functionality of all my dashboards.

Tableau desktop isn’t the only version to get an upgrade. Tableau Server has also gotten itself an upgrade too, of course, they all use Hyper and Viz in tooltip, but some small improvements that will make the server usage experience all the more pleasant has arrived.

Tableau Server on Linux, this is something I know a lot of system administrators are going to praise, no longer are people forced to have a virtual machine  of another operating system just to get Tableau, now it’s on Linux too and on any of the supported distributions (RHEL 7, CentOS 7, Oracle Linux, or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS). With Tableau Server on Linux you can make changes without restarting. Want to change the number of backgrounders, VizQL & application server, you got it.

Ever published to Tableau Server and realized you’ve made a massive typo and nobody in the office has forgotten about it in the past year, people still call you ‘Scales’ because your ‘c’ button slipped? Well, you can now hide and rename workbooks right from Tableau Server before anybody gets the chance to come up with another humiliating nickname for you. No need to download, republish and delete. Just hit rename and the job is done…  And hopefully that nickname is done too.

My favorite Tableau Server 10.5 features have to be Nested Projects and Subscription improvements, having a better organization system and customizable permissions at each of the levels. This new hierarchical system is going to save you on a lot of time and organization especially since permissions are inherited. With the time you save from mass subscribing multiple users to a view at once, you’ll manage to take that extra minute to breathe before the day is done!

Tableau Online has also gotten a few upgrades, such as Data source recommendations which uses machine learning to recommend existing data sources based on what your organization’s data source usage is.

This has been a quick look at some of the changes in Tableau 10.5 for both the Desktop, Server & Online Edition. With this new update I feel anybody is more than ready to jump into their data, from the smallest companies with Excel files to the biggest ones with data in the cloud, it has never been easier to get setup and going with Tableau!