Tableau Community-Driven Innovation Recap: Product Ideas Released in 2024

Community-Driven Innovation in 2024 — learn how community ideas are prioritized and built into Tableau product features.

As 2024 draws to a close, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude to the incredible Tableau Community. Your boundless creativity and innovative ideas have been a constant source of inspiration, driving us to develop products that enhance and enrich your experience. It’s your feedback and collaboration that help us push the boundaries of what’s possible in data visualization and analytics.

Thank you DataFam for inspiring, voting for, and sharing with us about the features released in 2024! This year we released features that address 150+ ideas with 46,000+ points in the Forums, across Tableau Desktop, Online, Tableau Pulse, and more. And we made progress on providing visibility into the ideas on the Tableau Community Forums: This year we have updated more than 2,900 ideas.

Here are some of the features inspired by ideas you submitted on the forums:

Viz Extensions (2024.2) & Table Viz Extension (2024.3)

See this idea on Sankey Charts and Thierry Jakercevic’s idea on tables

You asked, and we delivered—unlock your creativity and speed to insight with the latest updates to table formatting in Tableau. These enhancements, including resizing, sorting, and conditional formatting, are designed to help you visualize and present your data more efficiently and clearly. Together, these features not only streamline your workflow but also enhance the overall clarity and attention to important data points and anomalies.

For developers, Viz Extensions provide a unique opportunity to expand Tableau’s analytics capabilities with custom visualizations. These can be developed using any JavaScript visualization library and easily integrated into Tableau through our Extensions API. This makes it straightforward to deliver personalized visualization tools that can be scaled to every analyst in your organization and shared with the wider Tableau Community.

Wilson Po headshot

"Tables in Tableau have always been in the forefront of user feedback. It's a critical means for how our users deliver analytics, and stands to have more dedicated usability improvements. The community advocacy around these themes helped us build the business case with leadership that we should make a more dedicated approach as a Viz Extension, delivering to a variety of feedback on how users specifically wanted to design and format tables inside Tableau. It provided us the quantitation such that we could discuss usability in Tableau with decision makers, and help them rationalize that the investment to this experience is a data driven decision. The ideas forum continues to be how we think about the key issues we want to explore in our long term roadmap and specifically how we can develop the foundations that allow for us to be more responsive to the feedback as we look ahead."

Wilson Po, Product Management Director

We encourage developers to join our DataDev Developer community to share feedback and ideas for new extensions. Developers can learn more about developing new Viz Extensions by learning more about the Tableau Extension API.

Accessibility: Google Fonts in Tableau Cloud (2024.3)

Idea submitted by stelloprint dev

You spoke, and we listened! Support for Google fonts is a significant win for our front-end developers. With these web safe fonts, they can be used without having to install them on all client machines. This feature helps provide a consistent experience across all viewers' browsers, while maintaining the intended look and feel of your data visualizations and dashboards.

Rob Thomas headshot

"Thanks to our community’s input and ideas regarding our product support for web safe fonts. From their requests and feedback, we were able to prioritize and focus on adding new Google fonts to Tableau Cloud. These ten new fonts add new variety and options for our Cloud customers while also being web safe fonts. This adds a huge amount of value for customers needing a consistent representation of their data across browsers."

Rob Thomas, Product Management Senior Manager

Multi-fact Relationships (2024.2)

Idea submitted by Cristhian De la Hoz

The Tableau Community was ecstatic with the release of Multi-fact Relationships! This data modeling capability allows you to combine multiple fact tables and gain insights from complex data models. With Multi-fact Relationships, you can easily connect different data sources and analyze them together, without having to blend them. This is especially useful when you have dimensions that share the same meaning across tables, or when analyzing data that goes through different stages. To use Multi-fact Relationships, simply identify your base tables and create relationships between them and shared dimension tables. With this powerful tool, you can unlock new types of analysis and accelerate your time to insights.

Say goodbye to linking fields - easily blend data sources with shared tables and trees.

Thomas Nhan headshot

"The Multi-Fact Relationship update to the Tableau relationship data model brings together 17 different community ideas and discussion threads into a single feature. According to one customer, "MFR is the most consequential update to analytics by Tableau in the past three years!" We accomplished this by working hand-in-hand with our community to understand their analytic scenarios, iterate through multiple designs that changed the key branding elements of Tableau, and collaborate with partners to help the broader community to build more flexible data models that can answer more sophisticated analytic questions; so they can have fewer published data sources that can power more vizzes and dashboards. We have a tight feedback loop between community and the product team to evolve Tableau as the #1 analytics tool-of-choice for customers."

Thomas Nhan, Product Management Director

How the Tableau Community can help us innovate

Since 2011, the Forums have seen over 11,000 ideas contributed by nearly 4,000 members of our community. To everyone who's posted ideas, voted, offered feedback, instructed on new features, or shared their experiences: thank you!

In order to create a better experience for the community sharing ideas moving forward, at the end of this year, we transitioned our platform to the Salesforce IdeaExchange.

The IdeaExchange will host all of the ideas that are already on the Tableau forums and offer functionalities the old platform is lacking, including a community-driven prioritization system, the ability for the community to propose merging ideas, and an activity page to monitor the status of ideas you care about. A great way to learn about the exchange (besides exploring it yourself) is through this Trailhead.

In addition to sharing your ideas on the IdeaExchange, we’ve compiled a list of ways for you to get involved and help us shape our products below. We’re excited to hear from you!

Submit ideas (or vote up ideas) on the Salesforce Idea Exchange
Join our Tableau Research Program, where you can provide feedback on UX, design, and pricing & packaging directly to our product teams.
Join the Tableau Developer program to provide feedback on our APIs and work with our team on building the solutions on the Tableau platform.
Come to Tableau Conference 2025 and interact with our devs at Tableau Labs.

Thank you for your unwavering support and for being an integral part of our journey. We can’t wait to continue to deliver features you'll love in the year ahead!