Tableau 2021.4

Virtual connections

Virtual connections are a new content type in Tableau Server and Tableau Online that are used to create and share access to tables, securely embed service account credentials, define data policies and extract data centrally.

Enjoy a flexible way to integrate Tableau into your broader technology stack. Connected apps create seamless and secure experiences with simple and trusted relationships between your applications and Tableau using modern, secure, easy-to-use authentication services. With connected apps, Tableau admins have better control over security. You can set up a trusted relationship between Tableau and any external third-party application servers that use standards to embed a Tableau visualisation without requiring users to log in to Tableau. Additionally, you can control user access to embedded content and restrict what content can be embedded.

Ask Data and Slack integration

21.4 brings improved Slack integration to further broaden the reach of analytics across your business. You can now share a viz generated in Ask Data in Tableau directly to Slack, making it even easier to share insights with your teammates.

Centralised row-level security

Centrally define and manage row-level security among data tables and have it consistently applied across all connected Tableau flows, data sources or workbooks that depend on that data.

Edit published data sources

Managing data sources on the web just got easier. Say goodbye to downloading published data sources to Desktop to make your changes. You can now edit published data sources directly in Tableau Server and Tableau Online, test your changes and publish – all without leaving the browser.

Copy and paste in dashboards

Easily copy and duplicate images, text boxes and web page containers within the same and across different dashboards and workbooks in Tableau Online, Tableau Server and Tableau Desktop. This new functionality allows you to build beautiful customised dashboards faster by maintaining and replicating the format, size and details of already formatted items.

Tableau Exchange

The Tableau Extension Gallery that you know and love is now the Tableau Exchange! The Tableau Exchange is your one-stop-shop for offerings that can help you get a jump start on your data analysis.

Hire Me button

Tableau Public has become the gathering point for many of the best respected, most influential and most creative members of the data community. This means that the visualisations found in Tableau Public also include the highest tier of creativity and quality. With the new Hire Me button, we are better enabling authors to indicate that they are available for work and customers to see which authors are available to hire.

Tableau Accelerators

Accelerators help speed time to value with pre-made, expert-built content that broadly spans industries, lines of business and enterprise applications. They offer a way for our customers to achieve faster time to value and jump-start their analyses with best-in-class tools.

Replay animations

You can now replay data visualisations with animations with a click of a button to see data trends and changes faster. Pairing a data visualisation with animation provides repeated exposure to your data, which helps you interpret data, make comparisons among values, focus attention and spot patterns in your data quickly.

Salesforce-style colour palette

Quickly apply the same colour styles of your Salesforce dashboards to your Tableau visualisations. Streamline the customisation process when embedding a Tableau visualisation into any Salesforce dashboard by selecting the Salesforce-specific colours, now available as a new colour palette.

New formatting capabilities

Choose from a variety of number and date formatting options for parameters on Tableau Online and Tableau Server. For numbers, you can now easily format them to display negative values and localise currency with the proper symbol and value. For date fields, use any common date and time format or quickly customise it according to your company’s standards.

Multi-data-source support in map layers

The capability of adding an unlimited number of layers to your map visualisation just got more powerful. With support for multiple data sources in map layers, you can now analyse more data in the context of one another. For example, you can build a map that shows your retail stores’ location, accessibility, population and revenue – all coming from different data sources.

Metrics improvements

Released in Tableau 2020.2, Metrics provides the headlines for users’ data, enabling them to track key data points without having to access their dashboards. With 2021.4, you can now embed Metrics into your analytical apps, corporate portals or web pages to provide a more personalised experience for different people and teams. Additionally, during Metric creation, you can now set the comparison period and the date range used by the metric, and automatically apply colour status indicators so it’s easier to spotlight a status change.

Inherited lineage descriptions

With inherited lineage descriptions, ensure that column-level descriptions from data sources and workbooks are shared downstream. Forget having to visit tens or hundreds of instances. Everywhere that data source or workbook is used, the description will be consistent. This also enables description editing at a single source.

With Bridge multi-pool, you can achieve multi-network connectivity with online schedules. Multi-pool supports Bridge pools for each network so even the largest enterprise organisations can see and understand their private-network data in Tableau Online.

Subscription emails for flow completion

Once you subscribe yourself and your team, flow completion emails will appear in your inbox when a scheduled flow run is complete in Tableau Prep. Now get notified as soon as fresh data is ready for use.

New connectors in Tableau Exchange

Tableau Exchange now has 25+ connectors, including new ones for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Zendesk, ServiceNow and SAP HANA C4C, to help you connect to your data easily and quickly.

We will be adding new connectors on an ongoing basis, independent of the Tableau product releases, so make sure to check out Tableau Exchange.

Tiling in Tableau Prep

It's easier to clean up your data your way! Tiling builds on the already existing RANK and FIXED Level of Detail functions in Tableau Prep. It allows customers to distribute rows into a specified number of tiles or buckets based on a specified order by FIELD and GROUP BY or partition field.

Parameters in Tableau Prep

A parameter is a global placeholder value that can replace a constant value in a Prep flow. Parameters can be specified at run time or schedule time to easily transition a flow to be used on different inputs and outputs with the same schema, as well as quickly edit values used throughout a flow in calculated fields or filters.